Ernest Flagg

"Reason...to suppose any production, worthy to be called a work of art, can be made without its use is foolish. ...By the use of reason many mistakes in design may be avoided and many counterfeits of art readily detected....Beauty alone is an excellent reason for many things, but when a design is in direct conflict with common sense it cannot be a work of art."

"Reason requires all things to have a use and be appropriate and fitted to the purpose for which they are used."

"Unity. ...Unity of purpose is shown by continuity, or the proper relationship of the parts with each other, and with the whole as one sees it best expressed in the human form. Unity of mass is obtained by giving predominance of mass to some one feature..."

"Harmony. ...it is all embracing and should reign throughout—harmony in purpose, harmony in dimensions, harmony in form and harmony in color. In good design discord can have no place. ...all may unite to form a complete, harmonious, and well-rounded composition ..."

"Clarity or Decision. ...without it there is uncertainty, hesitation, obscurity, instability... incomparable with good art. The meaning and object of the design should be clear... it should be frank, as the French say."

"Variety. ...Movement, contrast, and accent all contribute to variety... the spice of life... Monotony and dryness are lurking enemies which may be vanquished by variety."

"The qualities called personal... and the ability to impart them, in greater or less degree, is the gage of genius in art."

"Imagination... implies originality. It results in a reflection... of the working mind of the designer. ...Imagination may be called the dynamic force in art. ...It is the quality which distinguishes the artistic from the photographic representation of nature."

"Interest. ...a design to be great must have great interest. ...the most potent of all ways to impart interest is to endow the design with beauty of form, and... the one which makes the strongest appeal to human interest and admiration is physical beauty in human shape."

"Refinement. While the possession of this quality is due, in the first instance, to education, it is also largely a matter of temperament."

"Simplicity and Dignity are so nearly related that they may be considered together. ...A quiet air of reserved power is characteristic of dignity, and that is best obtained by simple means and the absence of apparent effort. Simplicity is the mark of genius. The giant in art does his work easily, without straining and without affectation; his ways are direct and to the point."

"A master in art need not go into the highways and byways for affects; he knows the straight course and follows it."

"With dignity and simplicity come repose... the natural state of one at home in his surroundings and sure of his ground. Repose is a distinguished characteristic of Greek art."

"Style... the very hall-mark of great art... there is little use in trying to define style."

"Inevitably Le Corbusier's large-scale housing was associated with the more visionary aspects of his planning and deemed unacceptable to pragmatic housing reformers. That association formed a sixth barrier. On one hand, the Radiant City, like his urban visions of the 1920s, was linked to a tradition of utopian planning that thrived in America during the 1920s and early 1930s. Such projects and proposals by Raymond Hood, Richard Neutra, Kocher and Ziegler, Wallace Harrison, Hugh Ferriss, Harvey Wiley Corbett, Ernest Flagg, and others enjoyed wide circulation. On the other hand, what separated the Radiant City (and Le Corbusier's projects of the 1920s) from many of its American visionary counterparts was his radical treatment of urban infrastructure and his advocacy of cooperative ownership, thus mandating not only material changes in the structure of the city but also political changes in a free-market economy that historically promoted individual property rights."

"Few architects tried to emulate this honest and enthusiastic attempt to use the concrete itself as a decorative feature, and the more reinforced concrete frame structures became common, the more customary it was to hide the skeleton within a covering of brick... In 1905 Ernest Flagg, one of the most brilliant Beaux-Arts trained American architects of the day, had complained bitterly when a thirty per cent rise in building costs obliged him to substitute a reinforced concrete skeleton for the masonry construction of the at Annapolis, carefully modeled on the Dome of the Invalides in Paris."

"Ernest Flagg, the renowned twentieth-century architect, built the "new" Naval Academy in the early 1900s and infused a sense of grandeur into the Yard—physical structures befitting the training ground for the world's preeminent Navy. ...It is now recognized as Flagg's most monumental accomplishment."

"In 1908 the architect Ernest Flagg proposed that street facades should be limited to 100 feet and towers should be permitted to rise to an unlimited height above them so long as they occupied no more than twenty-five percent of the site, a provision that was eventually adopted by the city code. Flagg wanted to "Parisianize" New York with even cornice lines yet allow for a "diadem of towers"; his own Singer Building (1908) shows what he meant."