tom lever blog

31 January 2018

Ornament and Crime? - GD07

Note: As written, Certain elements of this post take loos' racism too lightly, my views have shifted since this publication and therefore i have made a few edits, especially in the introduction. There are certainly racist veins in architecture and design, a lot of that connected to modernism as a whole and it's rejection of 'uncivillised' perspectives. The following article is a starting point to see alternative perspectives, but more can be done to acknowledge how certain modernist polemics have ignored different races, ingored humanity, and worked with established power structures to the detriment of minority communities. https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/14738-three-architects-discuss-whiteness-and-racism-in-the-built-environment


I recently went back and acquainted myself with Adolf Loos' Ornament and Crime, specifically a collection of his essays compiled by Ariadane Press and translated by Michael Mitchell.

Having subsequently read much drier but more complex books, such as Art as Experience, I have rediscovered that the book is a rollercoaster, if polemical. It is full of exaggerated stereotypes and angry reflection on the world, giving an interesting picture of 1900's Vienna in the meantime. A lot of the book is naiive, outdated, and contains undeniably racist thoughts. It is important to acknowledge this when coming into this book, especailly because of the strong influence it has had on architecture.

Focusing on the architectural implications of this work, his central argument, specifically in the main Ornament essay, has two components, one, the most famous, is that:

"cultural evolution is equivalent to the removal of Ornament from articles in daily use"
Ornament and Crime, 1908 (1932)

Backed up by analogies to the 'papuan' who tattoos his face, by comparison, in Loos' generation,

"Don't you see that the greatness of our age lies in its inability to produce a new form of decoration? We have conquered ornament, we have won through to lack of ornamentation."
Ornament and Crime

The context for his arguments is twofold, they are both as a reaction against the aristocratic eclectic revival style, which reached a peak before the turn of the century;

"the School of Applied Art sets the tone... over the last twenty years the doorknobs have given us first renaissance, then baroque, then rococo calluses on our hands"
The New Style, 1878

He also argues against the 'new style', that being art nouveau, or in the form it found itself in vienna, as the secession:

"Bing's L'art nouveau in the rue de Provence in Paris, last year's exhibition in Dresden, and this year's in Munich will have to agree: the old styles are dead, long live the new style!"
A Review of Applied Arts I (1898)

He continues, turning away from sarcasm,

"And yet we cannot rejoice in it. It is not our style. It has not been born of our time. There are objects that clearly bear the stamp of our age, objects we like: our clothes, our gold- and silverware, our jewels, our leather goods, things made of tortoise shell and mother of pearl, our carriages and railway cars, our bicycles and locomotives. It is just that we do not make much fuss over them.

These things are modern, that is, in the style of 1898"
A Review of Applied Arts

In product design terms:

"Take the thonet chair. Is it not the fruit of the same spirit as the Greek chair with its curved legs and its backrest, without ornamentation, the embodiment of a whole age's attitude toward sitting? Take the bicycle ...  If the Greeks had made a bicycle, would it not have resembled ours, right down to the very last rivet?"
A Review of Applied Arts

His problem with art nouveau then, and the secession, and the Werkbund that followed, was that they were intending to pursue a 'new style' that was no longer needed. The advance of culture and of the machine age was to eradicate the very need for style.

In his mind, it comes from an attempt by applied artists to barge in on the new manufacturing culture:

"do we need applied artists? my answer is no ... Our carriages, our optical instruments, our umbrellas, our silver cigarette cases and ornaments, our jewelery, and our clothes are modern. They are modern because so far no artist has tried to barge in and take them under his - unqualified - tutelage ... Those barbaric times, where works of art were combined with practical utensils, are over once and for all."
Surplus to requirements (The German Werkbund) 1908

 His main arguments come to the conclusion that most of our objects, our beloved posessions, in the turn-of-the-century middle class at least, were of an indeterminate, accidental, unadorned, but most of all a progressive style: that of no conscious style at all.

So we have got over the secession style, and in fact, the free market did that for us, replacing it with Art Deco, or the International Style, or Streamline Moderne, or whatever else; so what use is all this to us now? Loos' argument comes from the rejection of style all together;

"What is style anyway? It is hard to define ... If you have a lion's head on the nightstand, and the same lion's head on the sofa, on the wardrobe, on the beds, on the chairs , on the washstand, in a word, on every object in the room, then that is style.. Woe betide those unfortunates who dared buy some additional item! Their furniture refused to accept anything else near them."
The Interiors in the Rotunda (1898)

especially that of 'top down' style:

"I am against the trend [Otto] Wagner represents, which sees a positive advantage in having everything in a building, right down to the coal shovel, come from the hand of one architect"

"Who should do it then? The answer is quite simple: Every man his own interior designer"
The Interiors in the Rotunda 

This is an example of how Loos' writing can cut through time and space and give us such relevant insights for our attitudes of today: the above article sees forward directly to the present: to IKEA specifically, and even if it isn't directly inspired, through Corbusier, the CIAM, and Modernism, it has found it's way into becoming a cornerstone of today's attitudes.

But what are the problems of today? Sure, we do not sit at the feet of an all encompassing, applied-artist-led 'style-of-the-day' but as the economy, through the last 100 years, has developed into a giant, consumerist whole, our personal choices have come under scrutiny.

I must note, I do not blame our generation, as a whole, the millennial culture, generally, directly and personally takes action upon global issues. These issues, such as mass-consumption, waste and global warming have been drilled into us and are a central part of our spirit-of-the times, but as designers, we are not sure how to address them. Minimalism, eco-design, and up-cycling are all relevant pursuits. Loos provides an appartent solution for us, in his very famous essay, Ornament and Crime:

"The form of an object should last, that is, we should find it tolerable, as long as the object itself lasts"
Ornament and Crime

He continues:

"A suit will change its style more often than a valuable fur. A women's ball outfit, intended for one night alone, will change it's style more quickly than a desk. Woe betide us, however if we have to change a desk as quickly as a ball outfit because we can no longer stand the old style. Then we will have wasted the money we paid for the desk"
Ornament and Crime

I can illustrate this as such:



So a desk should last longer than a gown, but how do we really 'say' how long things should last? Well ideally, given the climate, forever. We are trying to avoid oppressive, top down braggadocio though, so if we are to be calm suggesters and not polemical, egotistical designers, we should be accommodating to ideas of style and culture. In order to be environmentally courteous though, an idea not really explored by Loos, but more relevant than ever, it appears we are putting things on a scale according to their cultural and material weight.


So we can afford to give the odd evening dress a miss, in terms of our modernist, plain black ambition. But as we climb up the scale, in terms of both the 1900's argument for economy, and our new ideas of conservation, we, stylistically, should be more careful. This gives two important insights.

Given the completely new paradigm of digital technology, music, visual art, and the majority of media comes in a form that barely lasts a day, never mind months. Thus, it can afford to be 'less timeless', which is a phenomenon we see, as the online revolution in entertainment has become more immediate, more in quantity, and arguably less in long-term quality. This is not a bad thing, an instagram post scrolled past in a second might cost the world one milli Amp Hour, wheras before we got a whole newspaper furnished with but four illustrations.

It may ask serious questions about how we define 'timeless' in our generation though. Loos' architecture sought a semi-modernist, semi-classical reduction of ornament in architecture, which went into conflict with the secession architecture of the time, but was arguably already an existing concept in personal objects.

We can see now that, besides a few colours and patterns, objects have pretty much arrived at the non-ornament destination that Loos prescribed and celebrated. None of our phones, from Chinese basics to top-of the range iPhones show any obvious decorative appendage, besides the odd 'interesting' curve. Add to this list our TV's, our computers, our radiators, ovens, printers, toasters and microwaves - essentially everything invented since Loos' time.

Architecture poses a different question. How eager were the modernists in adopting the machine style for their new Villas? But architecture carries an established form. While a bicycle and a train carriage benefit from their birth at a time of new industrial awakening, a piece of building needs to grow as part of the city as a whole. Imagining that timelessness is the most pertinent issue;



Are we better pre-empting the next wave of architectural reductionism, by introducing risky, unadorned forms? Perhaps not. Is an idea that attempts to predict the next two hundred years of architectural progression, to jump to conclusions, the most likely to be timeless?



A conservative answer would be no. Thanks to the Lindy effect, ideas (and that includes architectural theories) last longer the longer they have been about. We are in a place to suggest that architecture, and by extension, more serious pieces of product design, would actually gain in timelessness if they took as much from the past as they did the future. If we invent a totally new thing, we can't look into the past to decide how it should look, but for something so essential, permanent and culturally ingrained as a house, or even more so a library or parliament building, it would be ludicrous to suggest that a tried-and-tested neo-classical form would end up looking more 'dated' than an avant-garde piece.

A vision of the future we could derive from this would be that of neo-classical sandstone brick buildings, furnished with mid-century furniture, and littered with flat, black, technology panels. Sounds like a dystopia? Someone should do a Black Mirror episode on it.

But hang on, isn't that exactly what exists?



2 comments:

  1. "None of our phones...show any obvious decorative appendage" however I might argue that in removing "ornament" from the phone, from technology as a whole, in removing buttons and slots and easy to hold form, we are introducing a new form of "ornament", the ornament in "lack of ornament". In spending so much effort in creating a sleek, un-decorated form in order to fulfill Modernist ideals, the designer is performing the same task as the "papuan" aboriginal. What do you think?

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  2. Yes I agree Christiane, there is certainly an aspiration towards hard-to-achieve-minimalism, as the realisation spreads that an unornamented form is harder (and more expensive) to realise than a decorated one.

    Perhaps a new paradigm of design that is genuinely focused on ecological protection will erase these notions of competitive consumerism that are still prevalent, or perhaps aspirational consumerism is a good, and, more importantly, natural thing that we can only build into.

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