They may be subsumed into decorative jewellery like the Charmed technologies presented at cyber-fashion shows from Boston to Beijing, or the pendant computer Toshiba showed in concept form last year.
Since its first recorded use in 1509 – on a ceiling in the Master's Lodge at Christ's College, Cambridge – the British have been wrapping their walls with decorative printed paper.
Everywhere you walk there are sad, orphaned relics – lone mailboxes, a decorative urn, a pizza oven, a sign on a knee-high gate in the middle of an empty patch of scrub that says, THIS PROPERTY NO SMOKING.
Traditionally, the ochre was used in everything from decorative arts to wedding ceremonies and even as a spice for fish and torshi (pickled vegetables).
The sequence was enough to land her an MGM contract, and she was offered a few decorative bit parts, culminating in The Bad and the Beautiful.
Reduced to a decorative mask, to distract from the great bulk looming behind, the facade is left orphaned, rejected by both building and street as a redundant rind of history.
Schiele's work was already expressionistic and daring, taking Klimt's safely decorative eroticism a bold leap further with his figurative distortions, mannered elongations and sexual frankness.
In one scrap of paper he imagines "as background, perhaps: An electric fête recalling the decorative lighting of Magic city or Luna Park or the Pier Pavilion at Herne Bay..."....
On the one hand, he specified timber "from the saw" and plaster "from the float", while on the other he was constantly on site, breathing down his workers' necks, insisting that the ends of steel beams be carefully stripped and twisted into impossibly elaborate decorative curls.
There are a couple of empty niches in the entrance, where others are filled with decorative mosaic; is now the time to fill them in?
In original design for One World Trade Center, the spire was to have been covered in decorative cladding.
