A polemical lecture by the Viennese architect Adolf Loos arguing that ornament on everyday objects is a waste of labour, money and material, and that its disappearance is a sign of cultural progress.
Loos gave the lecture in Vienna in January 1910; he himself later dated it to 1908, which is why both years appear. It was first printed in French in 1913 and collected in German in the book Trotzdem in 1929. It is short, sarcastic and deliberately provocative, aimed at the Vienna Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte, whose designers were covering furniture, cutlery and buildings with new ornament.
His argument runs in three strands. The first is evolutionary: ornament belongs, he claims, to an earlier stage of culture, and modern people express themselves in other ways. His most famous claim, put in our words, is that the advance of culture shows itself in the stripping of decoration from ordinary useful things. The second is economic: ornament wastes the craftsman’s labour and the owner’s money, and it goes out of fashion, so ornamented things are thrown away before they are worn out. The third is aesthetic: plain, well-made things of fine material are more beautiful than decorated ones.
Loos did not practise complete bareness. His buildings use rich materials (marble, polished wood, figured stone), and his houses have a complex interior arrangement of rooms at different levels, later called the Raumplan. But the house on the Michaelerplatz (1909–11), whose plain upper storeys scandalised Vienna, made the lecture’s point in stone, and the title became a banner for the modern movement.
The book, part by part
I The argument
Ornament as a survival from an earlier stage of culture; the modern person has no need of it.
Rules: Ornament is wasted labour
II Economy and time
Ornament as wasted labour and capital, and as a cause of early obsolescence.
III Material instead of decoration
Beauty found in the quality of the material and the precision of the work: marble, wood and cloth left to speak for themselves.