The Essay That Called Decoration a Crime

Adolf Loos gave a lecture in Vienna on 21 January 1910. It was called Ornament and Crime, and it is probably the single most influential text in twentieth-century design.

Three dates to fix first, because they matter.

It is usually said to be from 1908. It is not: the lecture was 1910. It first appeared in print in French, in 1913. The German text was not published until 1929, nineteen years after it was delivered.

So for two decades the most consequential argument in modern design circulated in the language it was spoken in by reputation alone. People knew what it said because other people had told them. That is worth holding onto, because the gap between what the essay is remembered for and what it contains turns out to be large.

What it is remembered for is the economic argument, and that argument is decent.

Ornament, Loos says, consumes skilled labour. The carver, the gilder, the inlayer spend hours on work that is paid badly relative to its difficulty, and the hours are not recoverable in the price. Worse, ornament is stylistically dated. A plain silver cigarette case stays usable for fifty years; a case covered in the particular curlicues of 1900 looks wrong by 1915 and is discarded while physically perfect.

So decoration destroys value twice: it wastes the maker's labour, and it shortens the life of the object below its material life.

That is a real argument. It is about waste and obsolescence, it anticipates a great deal of later thinking about durable design, and it can be assessed on evidence.

Now read the rest of the essay.

Its central analogy is tattooing. Loos opens with it and returns to it repeatedly. The modern man who tattoos himself, he writes, is either a criminal or a degenerate; in prisons, eighty per cent of inmates are tattooed; those who are tattooed and not in prison are latent criminals or decadent aristocrats. He contrasts this with the Papuan, who tattoos himself and is not a criminal, because, in Loos's framing, the Papuan has not reached the stage of culture where such a thing would be a crime.

That is the engine of the argument. Ornament belongs to a stage of development that the modern European has passed through, and continuing to decorate is evidence of arrested development. The scheme is a hierarchy of peoples, and the aesthetic conclusion is drawn from it.

This is not a regrettable aside in an otherwise technical essay. It is the structure of the thing. The economic points are supporting material for a claim about cultural evolution.

A century of design education dealt with this by quoting the conclusion and omitting the reasoning. You will find the line about the evolution of culture being synonymous with the removal of ornament in a thousand places, and you will very rarely find what Loos thought culture was evolving away from.

So where does that leave the plain modern object?

Exactly where it was, needing a different defence. A bad argument for a position does not refute the position, and there are good arguments available: that undecorated surfaces are cheaper to make well than decorated surfaces are to make badly, that they are repairable, that they do not pretend to be a material they are not, that they age without a style stamp on them. Any of those will carry the weight.

What cannot be done is to keep invoking Loos as the authority. If you cite the essay you have taken on what the essay says, and what it says includes a passage about Papuans and prison populations that nobody is willing to restate in their own voice.

Read it. It takes twenty minutes and it is unpleasant, and afterwards you will notice how much of what you were taught about simplicity was handed down from a text that the people handing it down had summarised rather than read.