"Crystal and Arabesque: Claude Bragdon, Ornament, and Modern Architecture"

By Jonathan Massey University of Pittsburgh Press, $59.95

Massey documents the life and little-known work of the Rochester, N.Y., architect and Broadway stage designer whose "projective ornament," a term he coined in 1915, presaged the geometric structures of Buckminster Fuller and the revival of surface pattern in contemporary buildings. Nature, mathematics, mysticism and modernism all figure in this cogently argued, liberally illustrated and smartly designed study.