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1. LOOS ORNAMENT AND CRIME SUMMARY SERIES OF TECHNICAL
2. LOOS ORNAMENT AND CRIME SUMMARY PROFESSIONAL BODIES WERE
3. LOOS ORNAMENT AND CRIME SUMMARY FREE FIELD FOR

Loos Ornament And Crime Summary Series Of Technical

186, # 957, 1973Adolf Loos (1870-1933) was not the finest architect of the century. For example, made several references to Loos's anti-orna- ment ideas, often using language similar to that Loos em- ploys in 'Ornament and Crime.'27 And the basic premises of 'Ornament and Crime' are succinctly sulnmarized in aA key milestone for Loos came in 1908, with the publication of his most widely cited essay Ornament and Crime, in which he wrote: I have reached the.Joseph Rykwert, Adolf Loos: The New Vision, Studio International, vol. 1880-90 Attended a series of technical colleges in.the time he first delivered 'Ornament and Crime.' In his writings in Die Fackel, Loos friend, the satirist Karl Kraus. 1870 Born in the Czech Republic to German parents, a sculptor and stonemason. The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects."ADOLF LOOS: ORNAMENT IS CRIME. It is the baby talk of painting.

The sense of contradiction is inherent from the outset. His writings were marked by the feeling their titles summed up: Ins Leere Gesprochen and Trotzdem (Spoken into the Void, and Nonetheless). He died in 1933, the year of the Nazi rise to power, a deaf, broken man in spite of his relatively young age. Adolf Loos was born there in 1870 he was therefore 48 when the Habsburg Empire fell. He had practised this trade of his and lived in Brno, on the border of the Czech and German-speaking Habsburg lands. He was the son of a prosperous craftsman: a monumental mason who had been very conscious of the dignity of his trade.

It was not only his distaste for the philistine ways of most of his student contemporaries, but also a fastidious care for personal propriety and integrity which motivated him. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he rejected the servitude of the fraternities and the brand of a duelling scar that went with it. Already, when he was a student at the Dresden Gewerbeschule, he showed his mettle. The army, the art-school and finally the American journey liberated him, severed the family ties and formulated his resolve to become an architect. But his father had died when Loos was just over ten years old, and his veneration for his father's memory contrasted sharply with his distaste for his mother's ways, her drudging insistence on security and achievement.

Loos Ornament And Crime Summary Free Field For

Instinctively, Loos already sought the smooth, the barely chamfered or edged. Curves, lines, inlays of varied materials covered all available plane surfaces. The designers of that time regarded surface as a free field for the ornamental inventor. Leather and silver objects of high quality became his passion.

But those three years in the United States did form Loos's view of what he was about decisively. ’ could not be the product of much direct experience in spite of the visits to Philadelphia cousins, his stay in America seems to have been taken up with nights washing-up in restaurants, living in the YMCA and poor lodgings, some journalism and occasional recourse to the breadline. His idea that ‘the American kitchen never smells of onion, that the American woman can prepare the most exquisite meal in a quarter of an hour she twitters like a bird and always smiles. He was, of course, a mythomane. And he rejoiced that the sensible Viennese bourgeoisie had rejected the fancy ornament which had become so popular in Germany and France. His period at arts-and-crafts schools had left him with an interest in ornament – as he recognizes in one or two autobiographical pieces but when he returned to Austria, his taste had been cleared by the sharp, clear Anglo-Saxon air he had breathed.

The right way to do things is the way they are done at the heart of civilization, and that was either in London or in New York. Look at the matters with which Das Andere dealt: clothes, manners, table manners in particular begging sexual mores among the very young the overdecoration of Wagner's Tristan in the Vienna Opera the ill manners of the very great (the Emperor Wilhelm II is named) street decorations for state visits and so on.All the time, the manners of the Anglo-Saxon countries are assumed as a model, as a standard of reference. Its structure could not be described it was made up of surface details, which together gave the outline of a fabled and highly desirable state of affairs. This Western culture had a curious physiognomy. But he was also to bring to Vienna the inestimable gift of western culture his little magazine (of which only two numbers appeared) Das Andere (The Other) had as its subtitle ‘a paper for the introduction of Western culture to Austria’.

His great hostility to the Secession, the group of anti-academic Viennese artists who were the Austrian branch of Art Nouveau, turned on this point also. Whenever he worked, he was always almost obsessively interested in how a building would be occupied. And yet for him it was not. And, sometimes, this insistence is taken to extreme lengths: Loos rediscovers the aubergine, familiar in Europe since the sixteenth century, as the American egg-plant and arranges to have American-type aubergine fritters served daily for a week in a named vegetarian restaurant in the hope of inspiring Viennese housewives and restaurateurs into emulation.It may all seem very remote from Loos's central business of architecture.

Clothing understood not only as protection, but also as the adorning of the human body. Clothing, he believed, was the primary stimulus for all figuration. While this idea stimulated the particular researches of certain designers such as Henry van de Velde, for whom Loos reserves his most withering scorn, the notion of style which can be summed up in terms of its ornamental patterns is an idea formulated — among others — by the great German historian and architect, Gottfried Semper. They thought that this ornamental surface could be applied not only to walls, windows, floors, and pieces of furniture, but also to clothes and even to jewellery in a scientific fashion, so as to stimulate or reflect emotional states.In some ways, this attitude to ornament had its source in the psychology (and later the aesthetics) of empathy, a teaching still not wholly dispensable, according to which we ‘read’ our state of being into the objects which surround us, and in a particularly heightened form when these objects present the pressing claim to our attention which works of art inevitably do.

If a tattooed man dies free, this is because he has died prematurely, before committing his murder.Horror vacui is the origin of all figuration. Tattooed men who are not imprisoned are either latent criminals or degenerate aristocrats. But a modern man who tattos himself is either a criminal or a degenerate. By the same token, the Papuan may tattoo his skin, his boat, his oar or anything he may lay his hands on. Had a modern — meaning a Western man — done the same thing, he would either be considered a criminal or a degenerate. In the most famous of his essays, the one on ornament and crime, he holds the Papuan up as an example of man who has not evolved to the moral and civilized circumstances of modern man, and who will therefore kill and consume his enemies without committing a crime.

Loos Ornament And Crime Summary Professional Bodies Were

But even in Loos's triumph, there is an element of inconsistency. Loos's contempt for their efforts had proved justified, while art schools, ministries and professional bodies were still intent on the study of ornament. Art Nouveau was already a thing of the past. Writing this essay as he did in 1908, it was easy to dismiss the elaborate confections of Van de Velde and Otto Eckmann, or even Joseph Olbrich, as worthless.

And that, Loos thinks, is what makes it acceptable. But were he to ask the shoemaker to make the shoes quite smooth, without any ornament, he would topple his shoemaker from the heaven he had raised him to by his offer into the deepest hell.The creation of ornament is the shoemaker's pleasure. Loos imagines offering his shoemaker a premium price for the shoes: a quarter more than usual, and the delight of the shoemaker at having such an extremely appreciative client. English-style brogues, one must suppose.