Rules · Ornament · Theory · Materials
Omit applied ornament from buildings and everyday objects: it wastes work, money and material, dates quickly, and adds nothing that fine material and exact workmanship cannot give.
Loos’s lecture is a satire aimed at the Viennese designers of his day; its best-known claim is that cultural progress consists in stripping decoration from the things we use every day. The argument is partly economic (the ornamented object costs more labour and is thrown away sooner) and partly cultural, claiming that the modern person no longer needs ornament to express himself.
Loos himself was no ascetic: he loved veined marble, polished wood and precise joinery, and his interiors are rich. What he banned was applied decoration. The distinction was often lost on his followers, for whom a plain white wall became the badge of modernity.
A thin curved shell carries load by the membrane forces in its surface, not by bending; so shape it to its loads and supports, and it can span great distances with a thickness of a few centimetres.
span ÷ thickness of a good shell ≈ 400–1000 (an egg: ≈ 100)
A new material calls for new forms: iron should be used in slender members that show its strength in tension and bending, not cast in imitation of stone columns and vaults.
In a framed building the columns and beams carry every load; the outer wall can be reduced to a light cladding hung on the frame, floor by floor, and need grow no thicker as the building rises.
load-bearing wall: thickness grows with height · frame: cladding thickness constant
The outward form of a building should arise from, and express, what the building does and how it is made, as the form of every living thing expresses its life.
Instead of applying ornament to a structure, shape the structure itself, especially exposed iron, into lines that are both constructive and decorative.
Build the house as a standard skeleton of flat concrete slabs, a few columns set back from the slab edges, and a stair; everything else (walls, windows, partitions) is infill that can be placed freely.
3 slabs + 6 columns + 1 stair
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Ornament is wasted labour”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/ornament-and-crime. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.