DETAILS: The Architect’s Art by Sally...

DETAILS: The Architect’s Art by Sally B. Woodbridge, photographs by Roz Joseph (Chronicle: $17.95). This engaging study of architectural ornaments, drawn from examples in the San Francisco Bay area, suggests the truth of Mies Van Der Rohe’s dictum, “God is in the detail.” Woodbridge has selected an eclectic array of decorations that ranges from classical columns and florid Victorian gingerbread to angular Art Deco foliage and the wonderfully incongruous walrus that adorned the Alaska Building (destroyed, alas, during the 1970s). She argues that well-conceived decorations on a building engage the viewer in the visual equivalent of a conversation with the architect, but laments that “Post-Modernism appears to have exhausted its chosen store of architectural references. The conversation is boring.”