Now on view in The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s, Joseph Urban's design for a roof garden reflects turn-of-the-century summer dining at its finest.

Joseph Urban’s design for the Roof Garden at the Hotel Gibson in Cincinnati, Ohio, reflects turn of the century summer-dining at its finest. Late-nineteenth century American roof gardens were inspired by European pleasure gardens, often devoted to entertainment.  New York producer, composer, and entrepreneur Rudolph Aronson is credited with not only bringing the roof garden...

This design for a stained glass window of a mermaid beneath the sea was commissioned by Associated Artists (the decorating firm of Louis Comfort Tiffany, Candace Wheeler, with (at times) Samuel Colman and Lockwood de Forest) for the Manhattan home of Wells Fargo President Ashbel H. Barney at 101 East Thirty-Eighth Street.   This subject is...

In this ornate design made of cut paper, contemporary artist Ernst Oppliger depicts three pairs of couples in windows at the top of a towering structure, while the windows below contain silhouettes of many exotic animals, including elephants, giraffes, and ostriches. Silhouettes became a popular art form in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,...

In 1951, Danish architect and designer Finn Juhl brought Danish Modernism to forefront of American consciousness. He did so with his interior for the “Good Design” Exhibition in Chicago, as well his design for the Trusteeship Council Chamber at the UN headquarters in New York, which he completed the following year. However, Juhl’s sculptural forms,...

There is no evidence that Tommi Parzinger’s textile design of collegiate banners was ever produced. Nevertheless, the brightly-colored red, blue, yellow and green flags speak to both the designer’s aesthetic and the time period. Throughout the postwar 1950s, as Parzinger’s career in New York took off, a wave of college spirit swept the United States....