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10. Glass and China 1898 Glass and China 69Show the pots a people have produced, and in general you can tellwhat kind of people they were and their level of culture, saysGottfried Semper in the preface to his section on pottery. 1And, onewould like to add, it is not only pots that have this power ofrevelation, every object of everyday use can tell us something aboutthe habits and character of a people. Pottery, however, does possessthis power to an exceptional degree.

Semper gives an example to back up his claim. He showsillustrations of two vessels women used for carrying water to thehouse, one from ancient Egypt and one from ancient Greece. Thefirst is the situla the Nile bucket, a container which happens toresemble the copper caldrons with which the Venetians draw water.It looks like a giant pumpkin with the top sliced off, has no foot,and has a handle like those on fire buckets. This water bucketreveals the whole physical geography of the country, its topography,its hydrography. We immediately realize the people who use sucha vessel must live on a plain, on the banks of a slow-moving river.How different is the Greek vessel Semper describes,

agrip for someone to help the water carrier lift thefull vessel onto her head.Thus Semper. His explanation will certainly have cut the idealiststo the quick. What? Those magnificent Greek vases with theirperfect shapes, shapes which seemed created solely to demonstratethe instinct for beauty of the Greek people? Their shapes are aproduct of crude functionality? The foot, the body, the handles, thesize of the mouth were all dictated by the use they were put to?That means these vases werepractical And we always thought theywere beautifUl We have been misled. We had always been taughtthat practicality and beauty were mutually exclusive.

In my previous article I made bold to assert the opposite, andsince I have received so many letters proving that I must be wrong,I have had to barricade myselfbehind the ancient Greeks. I will notdeny our craftsmen have reached a level that precludes any com-parison with other peoples or other ages. But I would like toremind you the ancient Greeks alsoknew a little about beauty. Andthey were led by practical considerations alone, without takingbeauty into account at all, without wanting to satisfYsome aestheticneed. And when an object was so practical it could not be madeany more practical, they called it beautiful. The peoples thatfollowed them did the same, and we, too, say these vases arebeautiful.

Are there still people who work in the same way as the Greeks?Oh, yes. A5 a nation, the English; as a profession, the engineers.The English and the engineers are our ancient Greeks. It is fromthem that our culture comes, it is from them that it is spreadingover the whole globe. They are the exemplars of nineteenth-centuryman.

These Greek vases are beautiful, as beautiful as a machine, asbeautiful as a icycleIn this respect our pottery does not for themost part match up to the products of the mechanical engineer.Not from the Viennese point of view, of course, but from theGreek. What a feast of superfluity At the beginning of the century

. . . the hydria whose purpose is not to scoop upwater, but to catch it as it flows out of the spring.That explains the funnel shape of the neck and thecaldron shape of the body, the center of gravity ofwhich is as close as possible to the mouth, forEtruscan and Greek women carried their hydriasontheir heads, upright when full, and horizontal whenempty. Try to balance a stick on the end of yourfinger: you will find it easier if you have theheavier end at the top. This experiment explainsthe basic shape of the Hellenic hydria (the bodyresembles a heart-shaped turnip), which is comp-leted by the two horizontal handles at the point ofthe center of gravity for lifting the vesselwhen full,and a third, vertical handle, for carrying it whenempty and hanging it up, perhaps also to provide


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our pottery was quite in the classical mold. Then the architects.came to Us rescue.I once sang in an operetta. Naturally it was set in Spain. At one

point there was some celebration-I think it wasthe birthday of themaster of the house-and a chorus of estu i nteswas brought on togive the composer the opportunity for a Spanish song, and thecostume designer a number of female singers to dress out. Theysing, and it makes no difference whether it s a wedding, a birthday,a baptism, an anniversary, or a name day, since:

We have the one songFor every occasion.We just come alongTo express our elation.

Go out into the world and see what is wanted. And when you havefully grasped that, go and work at the smelting furnace or thepotter s wheel. If they accepted that advice, ninety-nine percent ofartists would leave making pots alone.

Here in Austria we have not reached that point yet. But theEnglish spirit has entered our craftsmen and is rebelling against thedominion of the architect. I was secretly pleased, recently, to heara colleague complain to me that a potter had flatly refused to workfrom his design. He was not even willing to try. He clearly wasn tinterested in being saved. I told my colleague the man was right.He probably thought me a fool.

It is high time our craftworkers tried to throw off this un-called-for tutelage and started to rely on their own good sense.Anyone who wants to collaborate is welcome. All credit to anyonewho is willing to don an apron and take his place at the hummingpotter s wheel, or strip to the waist and help at the furnace. Butthose dilettantes who want to dictate their designs to the creativeartist from the comfort of their studios should stick to their ownfield, namely graphic art.

It was from England that the liberation of the craftsman came,and that iswhy modern objects are all English in style. It was fromEngland that the new glass cutting technique came: straight orcurved lines with prismatic cross-sections form geometric decorationover the whole glass.That this technique has already reached sucha standard over here that we can compete with America, a countrywhere it is in full flower, is not surprising, given the skill of ourglass cutters. Indeed, many of our creations are more refined ~ndelegant in their form; the American straight-lined patterns all havean overexuberance which I find old-fashioned. Almost all f irmsrepresented in the Exhibition have good examples, but I would justlike to single out for special mention the glass table set fromStolzle s Sons, the most elegant and modern set of glasses I couldImagme.

This firm and the others mentioned below have set up house inthe applied arts section of the Lower Austrian Trades Association

(- )

The magic formula was: For he s a jolly good fellow. I am quotingfrom memory, of course. It was ten years ago.Such estu i ntes were our architects. They had only one song.

It had two verses: moldings and ornamentation. And everything wasworked on and worked over with the s me moldings and the s meornamentation: fa


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exhibit, that is together with the interiors, and Plecnik's modernframework suits them down to the ground. The display of the firmof Emil Zahn from Blumenbach in Moravia, for example, showsexcellent taste. There are English glasses mounted in nickel silver,and a cut glass with straight-line decoration and green flashing (theclear glass has been dipped into colored molten glass)in a free style,which provides the first satisfactory resolution of this straight-cutglass with flashing technique. Everything that meets the eye is ingood taste-even the attendant, a delightful sweet sixteen who wonthe beauty contest last year. Now that 's what I call harmony

H. Kreibich, the well-known glass engraver, has a wholeworkshop in operation, and the master craftsman is always sur-rounded by visitors waiting while he engraves monograms andnames on the Jubilee goblets for them. Particularly delightful is agoblet decorated with good-luck charms, which I am sure has afuture. This modest glass might do much to revive glass engraving,which Lobmeyr's brought to its peak, but which is unfortunatelystagnating at the moment. What I have in mind is the delightfularrangement of the charms, which recalls the principle of decorationunder Emperor Francis 1.Count Harrach's Glass Factory in Neuwelt is exhibiting,probably for the first time, Tiffany glasses made in Austria. Withthe help of Venetian glassmakers, and using the latest devlopmentsin molten glass, Louis C. Tiffany, the son of the American gold-smith Tiffany, has discovered a new method of decorating glass.The pieces are formed not by cutting or painting, but by a cunningsystem of dipping them into different-colored molten glass duringblowing, in 'contrast to the Venetians, who weld a piece togetherwhile blowing. This process produces bowls and vases which surelyrepresent the very highest achievement of modern art. In thehandling of color, the pieces from Neuwelt are rather tame, but atleast a start has been made, and we hope that the glassworks willmanage to attract some artists to work with them.

The same optimism cannot be expressed about our potteryindustry. China painting still holds fastto the pretty-pretty tradition

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of the previous century. In stoneware and majolica there are suchshapes Among other things, there is an ashtray in the shape of aconcave coat of arms of our imperial house. Is there not a Collegeof Heralds that could step in? To be sure, there is quite a lot ofsecond-rate stuff among the glassware, but one can pass over thatin silence. In the pottery section, however, one is confronted withthe brash sign, All shapes and patterns enjoy legal protection forall countries of the world. My God Should one not rather give allcountries legal protection g imt these shapes and designs? Onecannot help such thoughts when bad taste flaunts itself like that.It is in vain that one will look for pieces such as are manu-factured in Copenhagen, more recently in Meissen, Rookwood nearCincinnati, and by the German firms of Lauger, Schmutz-Baudig,and Heider. There is a marvelous new-very new-materialavailable, an Austrian invention, eosine, but it is still waiting for theartist who will create an appropriate style for it. The copies ofRaguenet decoration-in the Oriental Art section-or the imitationmarbled enamel crockery are not enough. Keep it refined anddelicate; the Raguenet decoration seems to me to suit eosine better.But find an artist, a real artist The china painters Franz D6rfl andJosef Zasche display excellent pieces in the traditional Viennesestyle, but even here we will have to be more precise in copying tobeat off the competition over the next few years. Or createsomething new. But then something really new, as they do inCopenhagen. Theo Zasche should not find that too difficult.

In the large display of the firm of Ernst Wahlig the sampleplates from their stock of dinner services are once more the delightof the connoisseur. In these articles the firm has reached a levelunrivaled anywhere in the world. All the princely houses, thearistocracy of birth and of money in all parts of the world, havetheir china dinner services made here. Plates for Indian rajahs rubshoulders with ones for American plutocrats. To me, many of theseplates seem to symbolize the ~eginning dominance of a universalculture, a symbol of all-pervading English eating habits and ofall-informing Viennese taste. Not all of them achieve their effect


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through richness of decoration. One only has to look at the plateof Archduke Otto, a very model of simplicity.

Moritz Hacker, the nickel silver manufacturer, isdemonstratinga patent method of decoration which is new here. This, too, comesfrom America, and was used there first by the Gorham Mfg. Co.Glass, china, and majolica can be given a silver coating by dippingthem in a galvanizing bath. A partial coating is also possible,meaning that any decorative pattern can be reproduced. The piecesin the Japanese spirit, realistic flowers on one side only, aremagnificent; the rococo pieces dreadful.

Notes1. In: Der Stil in den technischenund tektonischenKunsten oder

Praktische Aesthetik (Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, orPractical Esthetics), 2 vols, 1861-1863.

11. LuxuryCarriages 1898Neustadt-all change.

The passengers get out. BUt we want to go to Steffelsdorf.That means two hours in the mail coach.What, two whole hours rumbling along, that's terribleWe're in Austria.

Kingston-all change.Here too the passengers get oUt. But they want to go toLonsdale.That means two hours in the mail coach.What, in the mail coach ? That's marvelous

We're in England.We Austrians think it rather odd to prefer, at the end of the

nineteenth century, a perch in the mail coach to a comfortable seatin the train. But first of all let us take a look at ourselves. We prefera cab to the steam or electric tram, though only when we think wemight be seen. Without an audience to gawk, we find no pleasureeven in the fastest cab. We should be honest enough to admit that.

But the English just enjoy traveling. They still have a sense ofthe poetry of the open road. In the town they climb into a hack ora hansom only in emergencies. Even the most refined of ladies willgo on the omnibus or tram, and in summer they are happy to finda seat on the open top. Here we sneak, shamefaced, into theinterior of the vehicle and are plunged into despair if an acquaint-ance should spot us in the omnibus. For a trip into the country,however, we get into the train with all the rest.

In England for a trip out into the countty, people ride the mailcoach And not squashed inside, but outside, up on the top. Men,women, and children all climb aboard, higgledy-piggledy; the fourhorses are hitched to the carriage, the guard blows a merry tune onhis long horn, and away they go. And they don't lean back in theirseats, blase and bored, as if to say to pedestrians, Please don't lookat me. They laugh and look round, merry and bright, one bighappy family.

This is a pleasure that everyone can afford in England. Thedemand has brought the prices down. A carriage leaves every largehotel at a set time. And people drive far out into the country, where


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56 Adolf Loos 8. The Interiors in the Rotunda 1898

Notes

In my last report I made some truly heret ical demands. Neither thearchaeologist, nor the interior designer, nor the architect, nor thepainter, nor the sculptor should furnish our apartments. Whoshould do it , then? The answer is quite simple: Every man his owninterior designer.That means, of course, that we will not be able to live in suchstyle anymore. But that style, style in quotation marks, is nolonger necessary. What is that style anyway? It is hard to define.In my opinion the best answer was given by the worthy lady whosaid that if you have a lion's head on the nightstand, and the samelion's head is on the sofa, on the wardrobe, on the beds, on thechairs, on the washstand, in a word, on every object in the room,then that is style. Word of honor, craftsmen of Vienna, have younot done your best to encourage the spread of such ridiculousopinions among the public? It didn't have to be a lion's head, butthere always had to be something molded onto the furniture, be ita column, a boss, a balustrade, sometimes elongated, sometimesshortened, sometimes thickened, sometimes slenderized.

These rooms tyrannized their poor owners. Woe betide thoseunfortunates who dared to buy some additional item Theirfurniture refused to accept anything else near them. If one wasgiven a present, one had nowhere to put it. And if one moved, andone's new home did not have the same room sizes, then farewell tostyle for good. One might even, horror of horrors have to put theGerman renaissance settle-cum-dresser in the blu'e rococo drawingroom, and the baroque cupboard in the Empire sit ting room. Howterrible

How fortunate, by comparison, was the stupid peasant, or thepoor laborer, or the old spinster. No such problems for them Nostyle in their homes. One thing came from here, another fromthere, all mixed up together. But just a minute The painters, whomwe had thought of as such paragons of taste, when they didpaintings of interiors, ignored our magnificent apartments andpainted the homes of the stupid peasant, or the poor laborer, or theold spinster. How can anyone find such things beautiful? For, aswehave been taught, the beauty of an apartment lies in i ts s tyle.

At a later date, when I discuss the individual interiors, I willhave the opportunity of demonstrating whether, and how, thenotions I have outlined above have been realized in the Rotunda.

1. Named after the Austrian painter of huge historical canvasesHans Makart (1840-1884), whose love of sumptuous furnishings sodominated the interiors of the wealthy Viennese middle classes thatthe eighties came to be known as the Makart decade.


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But the painters were right. They who, thanks to their trainedand practiced vision, have a much sharper eye for all outwardappearances, have always recognized the superficial, pretentious,alien, unharmonious nature of our stylish apartments. The peopledo not fit in with the rooms, nor the rooms with the people. Andhow could they? The architect or the interior designer hardly evenknows by name the person for whom he is working. Even if theoccupant has paid for the rooms a hundred times over, they are stillnot is rooms. In spirit they will always remain the property of theone who created them. That is why they do not, cannot appeal tothe painter. They lack any inner connection with the people whooccupy them, they lack that certain something he finds in the roomof the s~upid peasant, the poor laborer, the old spinster: a feeling ofintimacy.

I did not, thank God, grow up in such a stylish apartment.In those days they were unknown. Now, unfortunately, things havechanged in my family as well. But in those days Take the table: acrazy jumble of a table with some dreadful metalwork. But ourtable, our table Can you imagine what that meant? Can youimagine what wonderful hours we spent at it? By lamplight In theevening when I was a little boy I just could not tear myself awayrom it, and father kept having to imitate the night watchman'shorn to make me scuttle off in fright into the nursery. My sisterHermine spilled ink on it when she was a little tiny baby. And thepictures of my parents What dreadful frames But they were awedding present rom father's workmen. And this old-fashionedchair here A leftover rom grandmother's home. And here anembroidered slipper in which you can hang the clock. Made inkindergarten by sister Irma. Every piece of furniture, every object,every thing had a story to tell, the story of our family. Our homewas never finished, it developed with us, and we with it. It wascertainly without style ; that is, it had no alien, no old style. Butit did have a style, the style of its occupants, the style of our family.During the period in which the pressure to furnish one'sapartment in style became greater and greater-when all one's

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acquaintances already had aIde German rooms, how could onelag behind them?-all the old junk was thrown out. Junk foranyone else, but hallowed relics for the family. The rest is-theupholsterer.

And now we have had enough. We want to be lords andmasters within our own four walls again. If we lack taste, that's fine,we'll furnish our homes in a tasteless manner. If we have good taste,all the better. But we refuse to be tyrannized by our own rooms anylonger. We will buy everything, as we happen to have need of itand as we like.

As we like There we have the style we have been seeking for solong, the style we wanted to bring into our apartments. A style thatdoes not depend on one repeated lion's head, but on the taste-or,if you like, the lack of taste-of an individual or a family, andcomplies with their wishes. What would then unite all the pieces offurniture in a room would be the fact that their owner had selectedthem. And even if he were to prove somewhat capricious, especiallyinsofar as the choice of colors was concerned, it still would not bea disaster . A home that has grown along with the family can put upwith quite a lot. Putting just one single ornament that does notbelong into one of the stylish rooms can ruin the whole effect. Ina family room it would immediately be absorbed into the whole.That kind of room is rather like a violin: just as a violin is brokenin by playing it, so a room can be broken'in by living in it.These considerations do not affect the functional rooms in anapartment. My bathroom and lavatory and kitchen will be designedby the specialist in those areas. And this applies even more to thoserooms used for receiving guests, for social gatherings and specialoccasions. For those one should call in the architect, the painter, thesculptor, or the interior designer. You can rest assured that everyone

I will find the designer he deserves.There is always a contact intemperament between producer and consumer, which, however,does not go deep enough for the living areas.That is the way things always used to be. Even the king would


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guests in chambers designed by the court architect. And when anhonest subject was conducted around those golden halls andgalleries, he would heave an honest subject 's sigh. That 's the lifeIf only I could live in such a place Our honest subject imaginesthe king always goes around in a purple cloak trimmed withermine, his scepter in his hand and his crown on his head. Nowonder, then, that our honest subject, assoon as he has made somemoney, uses it to purchase what he imagines are regal apartments.It has alwayssurprised me that I have never yet come across anyonedressed in purple in them.

Gradually, and to our horror, we have come to realize kings livein very simple quarters, and that has led to a sudden about-turn.Simplicity is all the rage, even in rooms for special occasions. Onceagain, other countries are setting off on the new tack while we arestill starting the about-turn. We will have to go through with it,despite what our furnishing industry would like to think. Therehave always been close links between taste and the desire for change.Today we wear narrow trousers, tomorrow they will be wide, andthe day after narrow again. Every tailor knows that. Couldn't wejust abolish the wide-trouser period, then? Oh no We need it to beable to enjoy our narrow trousers again. Similarly, we need a periodof simple rooms for special occasions in order to prepare us for thereturn of richly decorated ones. If the industry wants us to getthrough the period of simplicity more quickly, there is only onesolution: they must impose it on us.

At the moment, though, this is just starting here in Austria.The best indication of the industry's tack is probably the fact themost admired room in the Rotunda is the simplest. It is a bedroomwith en-suite bathroom. It was executed by Schenzel, upholsterersto the Court, for the man who designed it for hims lf I thinkperhaps that aspect has most attracted the members of the public,who crowd around it. It exerts the powerful fascination of theindividual, the personal. No one else could live in it, no one elsecould fill it with his personality, could make it fully his own, apartfrom the owner himself, Otto Wagner.

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Hofrat Exner immediately acquired the room for the Parisexhibition, where its purpose will be to foster delusions among thepeople of Paris about the nature of Viennese bedrooms andbathrooms. To ourselves we can admit we are still a long way awayfrom that. But this room is destined to bring about a greattransformation in the way we furnish our apartments, for, as Iexplained above, the people like it. The Austrian Museum paved theway for this with its Christmas Exhibition. Just imagine, now theViennese even think a brass bedstead is beautiful And not a richlyornamented one either, but the simplest one possible, on which theupholsterer has not even attempted to disguise the brass bars withfabrics, as was previously standard practice when brass bedsteads hadto be sheathed.

The room is encased in smooth, polished, green paneling withvaluable engravings let into it in places. An ottoman with apolar-bear skin, two brass bedside cabinets, two wardrobes and twocupboards, a table with two armchairs, and several chairs completethe decor. Over the paneling is a wall hanging with realistic cherrybranches embroidered on it. The canopy over the bed is decoratedwith the same motiE The ceiling is whitewashed, and the lamps,hanging from silk cords, are arranged in a circle with plaster raysspreading out from it. The color effect, with the green of the wood,the yellow of the brass, the white of the fur, and the red of thecherries is exceptional. I will discuss the chairs in this room later,but for today I will say that the carpet 'is wrong. We have doneaway with the rosebuds we used to have to clamber around, but Ido not think it is an improvement if the carpets awake the illusionthat one might stumble over exposed tree roots. The cherry treespreads its roots allover the floor.

The bathroom is also a gem. The walls, the floor, the ottoman,and the cushions are all covered in the woolly material we use forour bathrobes. It has a restrained violet pattern, and the white andviolet, together with the silver of the nickel-plated furnishings, thetoilet articles, and the bath, determine the color tone of the room.The bath is made of mirror glass with nickel mountings. Even the


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faceted glasses on the washstand were made to Wagner's designs,the delightful toilet set as well, of course.

I am against the trend Wagner represents, which sees a positiveadvantage in having everything in a building, right down to the coalshovel, come from the hand of one architect. In my opinion itresults in very boring looking buildings. Every characteristic getslost. But in the face of Otto Wagner's genius I capitulate. OttoWagner has one quality which until now I have observed in only afew English and American architects: he can leave his architect'sperspective behind him and see things with the eye of the ap-propriate craftsman. He creates a water glass-he thinks like a glassblower and a glass cutter; he makes a brass bedstead-he thinks andfeels like a brass worker. All his great architectural knowledge andskill he has left behind. There is just one thing he takes everywherewith him, his artistry.

Chairs 1898The Otto Wagner Room-the modern bedroom and bathroom inthe applied arts section of the Lower Austrian Trades Associationdisplay-is beautiful, not because but in spite of the fact it wasdesigned by an architect. This architect just happens to be his owninterior designer. The room would not be right for anyone else, be-cause it would not reflect their individuality; therefore, it isimperfect and we can no longer talk of beauty. There is a con-tradiction there.

What do we understand by beauty? Complete perfection. It is,therefore, out of the question that something not satisfactorily per-forming its intended function can be beautiful. The first basiccondition any object must fulfill, if it is to be considered beauti-ful, is that it does not contravene the rules of practicality. Butbeing functional alone does not make it beautiful. There is more toit than that. The artists of the inqu nto probably gave the mostprecise definition: An object is beautiful if it is so perfect youcould not add anything or take anything awaywithout spoiling it.That would be the most perfect, absolute harmony.

A beautiful man? That would be the complete man, the manwho, through his physique and mental qualities, could offer the bestguarantee of producing healthy offspring and being able to supporta family. A beautiful woman? That would be the complete woman.Her responsibility would be to arouse love in the man, tobreast-feed her own children, and to give them a good upbringing.Then she will have the most beautiful eyes, keen, practical eyes, notmyopic, glazed ones; she will have the most beautiful brow, themost beautiful hair, the most beautiful nose. A nose through whichOnecan breathe perfectly. She will have the most beautiful mouth,the most beautiful teeth, teeth with which she can chew her foodperfectly. Nothing in nature is superfluous, and it is the degree offunctional value, when combined with the harmony of the otherparts, that we call pure beauty.

From this we can see that the beauty of a practical object canbe determined only in relation to its function. For these objectsthere is no such thing as absolute beauty.

Look, what a lovely desk


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King Solomon are quoted on the wall, but is not: Art, which madethe floor under the ancient 's foot and the vault of the church ceilingover the Christian's head, is now cramped onto boxes and bracelets.The times are worse than one thinks.

Notes1. Hermann Muthesius (1861-1927), a member of the Werk

bund. His three-volume Das englische Haus (1904, The EnglishHouse) was very influential in spreading the ideas of the Arts andCrafts movement in Germany.

2. See Note on p. 133.3. Kunstschau 1908 the title of an exhibition of arts and craftsshowing many of the Secessionartists a decade after their emergence.]osef Hoffmann designed the pavilion.

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29. Ornament and Crime 1929 1In the womb the human embryo goes through all phases of de-velopment the animal kingdom has passed through. And when ahuman being is born, his sense impressions are like a new-borndog's. In childhood he goes through all changes corresponding tothe stages in the development of humanity. At two he sees with theeyes of a Papuan, at four with those of a Germanic tribesman, at sixof Socrates, at eight of Voltaire. At eight he becomes aware ofviolet, the color discovered by the eighteenth century; before that,violets were blue and the purple snail was red. Even today physicistscan point to colors in the solar spectrum which have been given aname, but which it will be left to future generations to discern.

A child is amoral. A Papuan too, for us. The Papuan slaughtershis enemies and devours them. He is not a criminal. But if amodern person slaughters someone and devours him, he is acriminal or a degenerate. The Papuan covers his skin with tattoos,his boat, his oars, in short everything he can lay his hands on. Heis no criminal. The modern person who tattoos himself is either acriminal or a degenerate. There are prisons in which eighty percentof the inmates have tattoos. People with tattoos not in prison areeither latent criminals or degenerate aristocrats.

The urge to decorate one's face and anything else within reachis the origin of the fine arts. It is the childish babble of painting.But all art is erotic.

A person of our times who gives way to the urge to daub thewalls with erotic symbols is a criminal or a degenerate. What isnatural in the Papuan or the child is a sign of degeneracy in amodern adult . I made the following discovery, which I passed on tothe world: the evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal ofornamentation from objects of everyday use. I thought by doing so Iwould bring joy to the world: it has not thanked me for it. Peoplewere sad and downcast. What depressed them was the realization wecould no longer create new ornament. What? We alone, the peopleof the nineteenth century, were not capable of doing somethingevery negro tribesman could do, something every age and nationbefore us had done ?


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The objects mankind created in earlier millennia withoutornament have been casually tossed aside and allowed to go towrack and ruin. We do not possess a single workbench from theCarolingian period, but any piece of trash having even the slightestdecoration was collected, cleaned up, and put in an ostentatiouspalace built specially to house it. And we made our way sadlyaround the showcases, ashamed of our impotence. Every epoch hadits own style, and ours alone should be denied one ? By style peoplemeant ornamentation. But I said, Do not weep. Do you. not seethe greatness of our age resides in our very inability to create newornament? We have gone beyond ornament, we have achieved plain,undecorated simplicity. Behold, the time is at hand, fulfillmentawaits us. Soon the streets of the cit ies will shine like white wallsLike Zion, the Holy City, Heaven's capital. Then fulfillment willbe ours.

But there were hobgoblins who refused to accept it. Theywanted mankind to continue to strain under the yoke of ornament.Mankind had reached the point where ornament was no longer asource of pleasure, where a tattooed face, instead of increasingpeople's aesthetic pleasure as it does for the Papuans, diminishedpleasure. People had reached the point where they liked a plaincigarette case, while they would not buy a decorated one, even ifthe price was the same. They were happy with their clothes, andglad they did not have to go around dressed like fairgroundmonkeys in red velvet trousers with gold braid. And I said, See,the room where Goethe died is more splendid than all yourrenaissance pomp, and a plain piece of furniture is more beautifulthan your museum pieces with all their inlay work and carving.Goethe's language is more beautiful than all the flowery languageof the Nuremberg pastoral poets.

That displeased the hobgoblins, and the state, whose task it isto obstruct the people 's cultural progress, decided to promote thedevelopment and revival of ornamentation. Woe to the state whoserevolutions are made by its civil servants Soon in the ViennaMuseum of Applied Art there was a sideboard called The Miracu~

Ornament and Crime 169

lous Draught of Fishes, soon there were cupboards with names likeThe Bewitched Princess, referring to the decoration with whichthese unfortunate pieces were covered. The Austrian state takes itstask so seriously it ensures the ancient footcloth does not disappearentirely from within the bounds of the Austr~Hungarian monar-chy. It forces every cultured twenty-year-old man to spend threeyears marching in footcloths instead of in knitted hosiery. After all,every state works on the assumption that a primitive population iseasier to govern than a cultured one.

The epidemic of ornament enjoys state recognition and statesubsidy, then. For my part, however, I see that as a retrograde step.I do not accept the objection that ornament isa source of increasedpleasure in life for cultured people, the objection expressed in theexclamation, But if the ornament is beautiful For me, and withme for all people of culture, ornament is not a source of increasedpleasure in life. When I want to eat a piece of gingerbread, I choosea piece that is plain, not a piece shaped like a heart, or a baby, ora cavalryman, covered over and over with decoration. A fif~teenth-century man would not have understood me, but all modernpeople will. The supporters of ornament think my hunger forsimplicity is some kind of mortification of the flesh. No, my dearProfessor of Applied Arts, I am not mortifying the flesh at all. Ifind the gingerbread tastes better like that.

It is easy to reconcile ourselves to the great damage anddepredations the revival of ornament had done to our aestheticdevelopment, since no one and nothing, not even the power of thestate, can hold up the evolution of mankind. It can only be sloweddown. We can afford to wait. But in economic respects it is acrime, in that it leads to the waste of human labor, money, andmaterials. That is damage time cannot repair.

The speed of cultural development is hampered by the strag-glers. I am living, say, in 1912, my neighbor around 1900, and thatman over there in 1880. It is a misfortune for a state if the cultureof its inhabitants stretches over too great a time span. The peasantwho farms in the shadow of the GroBglockner lives in the twelfth


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century. On the occasion of the festival procession to celebrate theEmperor s jubilee we shuddered to learn that here in Austria we stillhave tribes from the fourth century. Happy the land that does nothave many cultural stragglers and laggards. Happy America Herein Austria even in the cities there are people who are not modern,people sti ll l iving in the eighteenth century, horrified at a picturewith violet shadows because they have not yet learned to see thecolor violet; people to whom a pheasant tastes better if the cook hasspent days preparing it, and to whom a cigarette case looks betterif it is covered in renaissance ornament. And out in the country?Clothes and household goods all belong to earlier times. Thepeasant is not a Christian, he is still a heathen.

These people who lag behind are slowing down the culturaldevelopment of the nations and of humanity. As far as the eco-nomic aspect is concerned, ifyou have two people living next doorto each other who have the same needs, the same aspirations, andthe same income, but who belong to different cultural epochs, youwill find the man of the twentieth century gett ing richer and richer,and the man of the eighteenth century poorer and poorer. I amassuming, of course, that in both cases their lifestyles reflect theirattitudes. The man of the twentieth century needs much less capitalto supply his needs, and can therefore make savings. The vegetableshe likes are simply cooked in water and served with a knob ofbutter. They taste good to the other only if there are nuts and Ihoney mixed in, and a cook has spent hours over them. Decoratedplates cost more, while twentieth-century man likes his food onwhite crockery alone. The one saves money while the other throwsit away. And it is the same with whole nations. Woe betide thepeople that lag behind in their cultural development. The Englishare getting richer, and we poorer. . . .

The harm done by ornament to the ranks of the producers iseven greater. Since ornament is no longer a natural product of ourculture, but a symptom of backwardness or degeneracy, thecraftsman producing the ornament is not fairly rewarded for hislabor. The conditions among wood carvers and turners, the

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criminally low rates paid to embroiderers and lace makers arewell-known. An ornamental craftsman has to work for twenty hoursto reach the pay a modern worker earns in eight. In general,decoration makes objects more expensive, but despite that i t doeshappen that a decorated object, with materials costing the same anddemonstrably taking three times as long to produce, is put on saleat half the price of a plain object. The result of omitt ing decorationis a reduction in working hours and an increase in wages. AChinese wood carver works for sixteen hours, an American laborerfor eight. If I pay as much for a plain box as for one with ornamen-tation, the difference in labor time belongs to the worker. And ifthere were no ornaments at all-a state that will perhaps comeabout after thousands of years-we would need to work for onlyfour hours instead of eight, since at the moment half of our laboris accounted for by ornamentation.Ornament means wasted labor and therefore wasted health.That was always the case. Today, however, it also means wastedmaterial, and both mean wasted capital.

As there is no longer any organic connection between ornamentand our culture, ornament is no longer an expression of our culture.The ornament being created now bears no relationship to us, norto any human being, or to the system governing the world today.It has no potential for development. Where is Otto Eckmann sornamentation now,2 or that of van der Velde? In the past the artistwas a healthy, vigorous figure, alwaysat the head of humanity. Themodern ornamental artist, however, lags behind or is a pathologicalcase. After three years even he himself disowns his own products.Cultured people find them intolerable straight away, others becomeaware of it only after a number of years. Where are Otto Eck-mann s works today? Where will Olbrich s be in ten years time.Modern ornament has no parents and no offspring, no past and nofuture. Uncultivated people, for whom the greatness of our age isa closed book, greet it rapturously and then disown it after a shorttime.


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Humanity as a whole is healthy, only a few are sick. But thesefew tyrannize the worker, who is so healthy he is incapable ofinventing ornaments. They compel him to execute the ornamentsthey have invented, in a wide variety of different materials.

The changing fashion in ornament results in a prematuredevaluation of the product of the worker's labor; his time and thematerials used are wasted capital . I have formulated the followingprinciple: Theform of an objectshould last that is we shouldfind ittolerable as long as the object itself lasts I will explain: A suit willchange its style more often than a valuable fur. A woman's balloutfit, intended for one night alone, will change its style morequickly than a desk. Woe betide us, however, if we have to changea desk as quickly as a ball outfit because we can no longer stand theold style. Then we will have wasted the money we paid for thedesk.

Ornamental artists and craftsmen are well aware of this, and inAustria they try to show this deficiency in a positive light. They say,A consumer who has furnishings he cannot stand after ten years,and thus isforced to refurnish his apartment every ten years, is bet-ter than one who buys something only when the old one becomesworn out with use. Industry needs that. The rapid changes in fash-ion provide employment for millions.

This seems to be the secret of the Austrian economy. When afire breaks out, how often does one hear someone say, Thank GodNow there is work for people again. Just set a house on fire, setthe Empire on fire, and everyone will be rolling in money Just keepon making furniture we chop up for firewood after three years,mountings we have to melt down after four, because even atauction they will not fetch a tenth of the cost of labor and materi-als, and we will get richer and richer

Not only the consumer bears the loss, it is above all theproducer. Nowadays, putting decoration on objects which, thanksto progress, no longer need to be decorated, means a waste of laborand an abuse of material. If all objects would last as long inaesthetic terms as they last physically, the consumer would be able


to pay a price for them that would allow the worker to earn moremoney and work shorter hours. For an object from which I amconvinced I will get full use until it is worn out I am quite happyto pay four times the price of another I could buy. I am happy topay forty crowns for my shoes, even though there are shoes for tenin another shop. But in those trades that languish under the yokeof the ornamental artist, no value is put on good or bad workman-ship. Work suffers because no one is willing to pay for it at its truevalue.

And that is a good thing too, since these ornamented objectsare bearable only when they are shoddily produced. I find it easierto accept a fire when I hear it is only worthless rubbish that isbeing destroyed. I can enjoy the trumpery in the Kunstlerhau~because I know it takes a few days to put it up and one day to tearit down. But throwing coins instead of stones, l ighting a cigar witha bank note, crushing up and drinking a pearl, I find unaesthetic.

Only when these ornamented things have been made from thebest material with the greatest care, and have taken up many man-hours of work, do they become truly unaesthetic. I have to admitI was the first to demand quality workmanship. Professor Hoff-mann's interior for the Apollo Candle Factory shop in Vienna, donein pine with a colored stain fourteen years ago, is by no means asunbearable as his current designs. Or as unbearable as Hoffmann'sdesigns will look in a further fourteen years' time. My CafeMuseum, however, which opened at the same time as the shop, willbe unbearable only when the carpentry work begins to fall apart.

A modern person, who regards ornament as a symptom of theartistic superfluity of previous ages and for that reason holds itsacred, will immediately recognize the unhealthy, the forced-pain-fully forced-nature of modern ornament. Ornament can no longerbe produced by someone living on the cultural level of today. It isdifferent for individuals and people who have not yet reached thatlevel.

The ideal I preach is the aristocrat. What I mean by that is theperson at the peak of humanity, who yet has a profound under-


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standing of the problems and aspirat ions of those at the bottom.One who well understands the way the African works patterns intohis cloth according to a certain rhythm, so the design appears onlywhen the fabric is taken off the loom; likewise the Persian weavinghis rug, the Slovak peasant woman making her lace, the old womanmaking marvelous needlework from silk and glass beads. Thearistocrat lets them carry on in their own accustomed way, heknows the time they spend on their work is sacred to them. Therevolutionary would go and tell them it was all pointless, just as hewould drag an old woman awayfrom the wayside shrine, telling herthere isno God. But the atheist among the aristocrats still raiseshishat when he passes a church.

My shoes are covered with decoration formed by sawtoothpatterns and holes. Work done by the shoemaker, work he has notbeen paid for. Imagine I go to the shoemaker and say, You chargethirty crowns for a pair of shoes. I will pay you forty-eight. It willraise the man to such a transport of delight he will thank methrough his workmanship and the material used, making them ofa quality that will far outweigh my extra payment. He ishappy, andhappiness is a rare commodity in his house. He has found someonewho understands him, who respects his work, and does not doubthis honesty. He can already see the finished shoes in his mind s eye.He knows where the best leather is to be found at the moment, heknows which of his workers he will entrust with the task, and theshoes will have all the sawtooth patterns and holes an elegant pairof shoes can take. And then I say, But there is one condition. Theshoes must be completely plain. I will drag him down from theheights of bl iss to the depths of hell. He will have less work, and Ihave taken away all his pleasure in it.

The ideal I preach is the aristocrat. I can accept decoration onmy own person if it brings pleasure to my fellow men. It bringspleasure to me, too. I can accept the Mrican s ornament, thePersian s, the Slovak peasant woman s, my shoemaker s, for itprovides the high point of their existence,which they have no othermeans of achieving. We have the art that has superseded ornament.

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After all the toil and tribulations of the day, we can go to hearBeethoven or Tristan My shoemaker cannot. I must not take hisreligion away from him, for I have nothing to put in its place. Butanyone who goes to the Ninth and then sits down to design awallpaper pattern is either a fraud or a degenerate.

The disappearance of ornament has brought about an un-dreamed-of blossoming in the other arts. Beethoven s symphonieswould never have been written by a man who had to dress in silk,velvet, and lace. Those who go around in velvet jackets today arenot artists, but clowns or house painters. We have become morerefined, more subtle. When men followed the herd they had todifferentiate themselves through color, modern man uses his dressas a disguise. His sense of his own individuality is so immenselystrong it can no longer be expressed in dress. Lack of ornamentationis a sign of intellectual strength. Modern man uses the ornamentsof earlier or foreign cultures as he likes and as he sees fit. Heconcentrates his own inventive power on other things.

AfterwordThis article by the Viennese architect, written in 1908, at whicht ime it was the caUseof riots among applied artists in Munich, butreceived with rapturous applause when del ivered as a lecture inBerlin, has never before been published in German. The title,Ornament and Crime, is a catchword for many, known even topeople who never knew where it came from. The article hasappeared in the languages of all advanced nations, even in Japaneseand He.brew. The only one missing was German. We are gratefulit has been made available to us so we can publish it on theoccasion of the Frankfurt meeting of the International Associationfor New Building. It demonstrates to us today that, at the timewhen art nouveau was flourishing, Adolf Loos was perhaps the onlyperson who was clear about what is modern ust as the housesAdolf Laos built twenty years ago, and which at that time aroused

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a storm of indignation, are now accepted as expressions of purefunctional form.4Notes

1. This essay was written in 1908. We dedicate it to theSecond International Congress for New Building, meeting today inFrankfurt. Footnote in the rankfurter Zeitung

2. See note, p. 38.3. The gallery of the Association of Viennese Artists.4. The Afterword appeared in the rankfurter Zeitung

........

3 Brief Intermezzo 1909Opposite the Opera, in the Heinrichshof, is the Viennese branch ofthe French metalware manufacturer Christofle. I have to pass itevery day. The window display never makes me stop.

A year ago something special happened. I was about to rushpast again when something pulled me back with a jerk.In the middle of all the tableware and cutlery-cutlery ofEnglish design for people who can eat, and cutlery for those whocan t, after designs by Olbrich-there was a life-sized Dobermanpinscher. White china, glazed. Only the eyes and muzzle werecolored.

My first thought was: Copenhagen. And I began to revise myverdict on Copenhagen chinaware. I certainly would like to possessthat dog. So there were artists who could create things in this stylepeople want to possess. What was the artis t called? Where did helive?I went in and asked. And learned the man had been dead forsomething like a hundred and fifty years. I t was a copy from theSevres factory.I couldn t afford to buy it, but from then on I stopped everyday to see my dog.It went on like that for a year, but then recently all my pleasurevanished. The dog had gone. I went in and asked, Where is myd :>og.An American had bought it. But they promised they wouldhave another sent and pur it in the window.And I hope the Americans will use the sidewalk on the otherside of the street.

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