Material Sedition: Resistance and Criminality in Adolf Loos's

14 Pages·2009·0.04 MB·English

by  Patrick Harrop

Material Sedition: Resistance and Criminality in Adolf Loos’s Ornament and Crime.
Patrick H Harrop

“The child is amoral. To us the Papuan is also amoral. The Papuan slaughers his enemies
and devours them. He is no criminal. If, However, the modern man slaughters and
devours somebody, he is a criminal or a degenerate. The Papuan tattoos his skin, his boat,
his oar, in short, everything that is within his reach. He is no criminal. The modern man
who tattoos himself is a criminal or degenerate. There are prisons where eighty percent of
the inmates bear tattoos. Those who are tattooed but are not imprisoned are latent
criminals or degenerate aristocrats.” (Loos p29)

When read in a contemporary environment, Adolf Loo’s infamous critique of ornament,
presents a challenging, if not troubling, sampling of a pre war bigoted culture. Loos is
explicit in associating the practice of ornament with criminality and degenerate behavior.
To make things even more distasteful, he implies a racial, if not racist, basis for the
apparent need to ornament.

Like most architectural theory that preceded “Ornament and Crime”, Adolf Loo’s critique
of ornament begins with the question of adorning the naked body. Loos portrays the
adornment of tattoos as both a reflection of criminality, but most importantly as a barely
containable compulsion of an immature culture. The urge to adorn extends to everything
“within their reach”(Loos p29). Ornament begins with the body, and extends itself
beyond the body to its extensions of everyday life. If the desire to ornament begins with
the body, then its gesture of embedding itself in the material world through its tools,
environment and institution is a compulsion to bring the world to the surface of the body
and vice versa.
The earliest descriptions of ornament do indeed reference the body as the first terrain of
ornament. Marcus Pollio (Vitruvius) describes the classical orders using corporeal
metaphors such as “the graceful elegant appearance of a virgin” (Vitruvius: Book IV,
chapter 1) or the base of the Doric column as “the folds of a matronly garment”(ibid). As
with most architectural theory until the 19th century, Vitruvian theory served as the
template for all subsequent descriptions of ornament, with subtle but telling nuances.
Leon Battista Alberti in De Re Aedificatoria or On the Art of Building in Ten Books,
takes great care in describing ornament as the clothing that completes the body as
“mitigating light and the visual senses” (Alberti: p156). Gottfried Semper, Loos’s
adversary and contemporary described clothing as the primary stimulus for all
ornamental figuration. Semper would even take this further by considering tattooing
among the ornamental arts of mankind (Leatherbarrow and Gombrich: op cit)

The making of complex form, such as ornament, relied on the transformation of matter
using the self-contained and propelled algorithms of geometry, proportion, adjustment
and tolerance. If geometry was this scaleless set of idealized spatial instructions then,
proportion was its agent of execution in the material world. Proportion was the
mechanism by which geometry adjusted itself to the infinity of constraints either found in
the natural world or accumulated by the resulting gradual contrivances evolving through
the building process project. Within any surface, any space and any opportunity the
procedural order of self-contained proportionate algorithms would project themselves,
wrap themselves, adhere themselves and even carve themselves into the malleable world.
The artisan was the privileged master with the gift of mediating these extremities.
Through intimate knowledge of his materials and tools, the artisan was compelled to fill
the horror vacuii with the intuitive interpretation of the algorithms of geometric
proportion (Gombrich: 63 - 95). Amor infiniti, the love of infinite frames and
permutations of ornaments would be interpreted into surfaces, woven through structures
and projected into broad spaces (Gombrich: 63 - 95).

Geometry exploits the boundary condition of the human body as an idealized prototype
for all orders originating from human endeavour. For example Vitruvian geometry can
best described as a proportionate spatial relationship between the human body and the
material world: A haptic dance of limits and boundaries. This discreet order at the origins
of everything manufactured or produced could only intentionally be revealed through the
elaborated work of the artisan (Perez-Gomez). Geometric order was intrinsically tied to
the gestures of the artisan as they spatially negotiated the crafting of material. The
mediation of matter with this order had more to do with the dance of strings, steps,
marks, cuts and jigs than the pure and rarefied theorem of what we have come to expect
from a "Euclidean" mind. The successful appearance of geometry would depend on the
practical artistry of the artisan and his/her seemingly mysterious ability to coax and
encourage the transmutation of chaotic form into geometric order. Rather than being a
rule, proportion helped with the difficult negotiation between idealized geometry and
imperfect matter.

Loos describes ornament as the onslaught of ornament as an “epidemic” underwritten
even encouraged by the state (Loos: p31). The suggestion is that ornament is a disease or
pathogen risks infecting the entirety of Viennese culture. The implication that the disease
is somehow gradually working itself through the “culture” suggests both the physical
transmogrification of the urban fabric and at the same time the cultural values of
Viennese citizenry. The threat of epidemic, is a gradual and ubiquitous accretion of a
diversionary layer over the nation as a whole. What is most telling though is that Loos is
careful to describe this overburdening of Viennese culture in both the actions of everyday
life, but as well in the adornment of everyday objects.

For Loos, ornament is described as a proliferation rather than a static state of architectural
culture. Loos proposes a vicious pathogen whose evolution threatens to consume its host.
Proliferation implies a timeline: a ubiquitous accretion that begins with a kernel, but that
spirals out of control. Yet as a reference to the architectural “tradition” of ornament, this
is a odd reference, particularly for turn of the century Vienna. As an architectural
historian, Loos’s claim of a proliferation is inaccurate, if not ungrounded. One could
hardly suggest ornament as an evolving phenomenon when, in fact, ornament has existed
since appearance of the first figure of the cross inscribed on a stone (Loos: p1).

Loos begins with the geometric inscription of the body but takes his argument much
further. His vocabulary is suggestive of a proportioned and generated infection
propagating way beyond the corporeal limits of the tattoo.

“The immense damage and devastation which the revival of ornament has caused to
aesthetic development could easily be overcome because nobody, not even the power of
the state, can stop the evolution of humanity! It represents a crime against the national
economy, and, as a result of it, human labour, money and material are ruined. Time
cannot compensate for this kind of damage.” (Loos: p31)

The critique of ornament is brought into an even broader forum of criticism. The urgency
of Loo’s appeal is hardly nuanced. The striking words of “devastation”, “ruin” and
“damage” are hardly consistent with the collegiality of an aesthetic debate. Loos is never
specific as to a particular architectural target that merits an aesthetic criticism. Rather, his
target is broader and all encompassing. For Loos the crime is that of a cultural behaviour,
the apparatus of the state wreaking devastation on the state and the economy of a nation.
The ornament pervasively weaves itself through every aspect of life from the most basic
daily habits to the weighty decisions of government. The state itself is the architectural
apparatus, over laden with gilded waste of official decoration. The rhetoric of this
critique is in itself a form of ornamentation. Loo’s critique is pervasive and extreme in its
dramatic tone. Although at the first glance, his prose is excessive, its critical and
extremist content is well within the spirit of his associate, Karl Kraus’s “Therapeutic
Nihilism” (Maciuika). Ornament and Crime then is hardly an aesthetic critique. Rather, it
is a theatrical and utopian manifesto that reveals the larger cultural implications of what
and how we make. Wittgenstein would credit Loos approach as being a major influence
on the construction and design of his notorious house (Maciuika).

Perhaps one of the most perplexing things about this piece is the deliberate exclusion of a
critique which specifically addresses architectural ornament. Ornament and Crime resides
in the periphery of a traditional architectural discourse. Loos is preoccupied with the
impact of ornaments in everyday life and in its implications in the larger machinations of
the state. Until the turn of the century, architectural theory had mostly been understood as
being defined by the civic edifice as its form of expression. Domesticity was largely
regarded as a vernacular form without any significance in the development of
architectural debate. Yet for Loos, the framing of “everyday life” was at the core of any
architectural work.

“The vegetable which is appetizing to him is simply boiled in water and has butter spread
over it. To the other man it will only taste good if honey and nuts are added to it and it
has been cooked by someone for hours. (Loos: p32)

His obsession with the decorum and form of domesticity revealed a significant departure
from traditional architectural theory. Architecture, at this point, faced a critical set of
junctures in the history of modernism. As the privileged embodiment of the cultural order
of the western world, the “institution” in its architectural form has lost its relevance. The
more relevant issue were the larger, more ubiquitous political institutions that emerged
with the modern movement. Loos was obsessively interested in how a building would be
occupied. Repeatedly, Loos asserted that the architect's business is with the immeuble, the
craftsman's with the meuble. The architect saw to the inert volume, to the walls and
ceilings and floors, to the fixed details such as chimneys and fireplaces. The impact of
the built environment had huge implications on the lived world and vice versa.

A further aspect that provoked a crisis in architectural thought was the advent of
industrialization. If the lived world proved to be the seed of political crisis, then the
making of that world was an equally problematic issue. At issue was the implication of
the manufacturing industry. While mass production had the potential to completely
revolutionize the production of habitat, it had sinister implications that could not be
overlooked. As one could imagine, the mass production of ornament was Loos’s proof of
the degenerate state. In loos’s opinion it was an oppressive imposition of state decorum
on the entire populace of Vienna. More importantly, mass produced ornament was the
harbinger of economic and cultural ruin.

“Ornament is wasted manpower and therefore wasted health. It has always been like this.
But today it also means wasted material, and both mean wasted capital.” (Loos: p33)

What was truly at stake was the very cultural and economic fabric of craft. Craft and
materiality die with the industrial process and the proliferation of mass production. At
issue was the growing disparity between the urbanized population of Vienna and the rural
countryside. The growing disparity can only be attributed to a growing cultural ignorance
of those within the walls of the city. Ornament is the manifestation of this ambivalence.

“The creation of ornament is the shoemaker's pleasure.” (Loos: p36) And that, Loos
thinks, is what makes it acceptable. ‘I can put up with ornament on my own body even, if
it is a witness to the pleasure of my fellow-man.” (Loos: p36)

At some point, Loos concedes to ornament. In an apparent slide into contradiction he
advocates the shoemaker’s craft as an ornament that is not only acceptable, but
pleasurable. The pleasure, however is not in the aesthetic product but in the act of
ornamentation. This is an important distinction for loos. The act of craft is a true
engagement of the material world with virtuosity. In contrast to his critique of the modern
industrial waste of state ornament, the relationship developed between material and
culture have a privileged stake. At the centre of this relationship is the shoemaker: a
gifted artisan who mitigates through talent, knowledge and pleasure, the material world
into the world of use. Loos points to an alternate economy in contrast to the
contemporary disaster that is looming. His acknowledgment of praxis points to an
appropriate set of relationships that provide the foundations for economy, exchange and
dialogue.

How do we reconcile the glaring contradiction between what is an acceptable form of
ornament and one that is clearly presented as a menace? Loos is clearly presenting us
with two forms of ornament. One is clearly tied to the potential menace of
industrialization and its tendency to be exploited and manipulated by the state. The other
form of ornament is somehow more benign by being grounded in a craft-based culture.
Mass-produced ornament embodies an empty and meaningless formalism. It is a physical
testament to the strictures and a quorum that are debilitating culture. While his admiration
of crafts may seem nostalgic, it is really a cultural ground of making that is at stake. Craft
was the only form of material engagement. Every aspect of traditional culture would
manifest itself into the world through the auspices of the artisan. The cycle of material,
knowledge and ability would serve as the underpinnings to our entire built environment.
This structure would be pervasive and far reaching: every economy and social structure
would have its origins in the cycle of craft. Industrialization would radically breech this
structure. Industrialization would exclude the individual from any meaning full
relationship with the object. Materiality, would also undergo a radical transformation that
we are even experiencing now. Where material would be specific to the object, it would
undergo a process (both chemical and topological) of homogenization to improve its
mutability and repeatability for industrial processes.

The distinction between craft and industry is an important one. Theorist David Pye makes
this distinction by identifying the workmanship of certainty (as found in modern
industrial production) and the workmanship of risk (as found in traditional craft (Pye:
p28). As Loos points out, the “evolution” of humanity is impossible if it is dominated by
ornament. Risk is an essential part of the evolution of form and ideas. At some point in
the evolution of a body of work, an artisan must risk the collapse of their work by
challenging the material limits of their art. This is not just a knowledge of material but
one of action within the horizon of logos (language) and dike (fate) – this is the meaning
of metis; i.e. fate can turn at any moment in the process.

This suggests that craft excels when its process is forced to unfold a geometric map of
engagement under aberrant material conditions. If we can consider traditional
architectural geometry as a projective map of self-contained procedural movements
through the malleable world then its complexity and authenticity of its fabrication would
be privileged by the unique context of its material and even cultural conditions. Yet the
overarching tendency of industrialization and technology has been to eliminate resistance
and risk by restricting “making” to a process of prediction and the substrate (both virtual
and real) to palette of homogeneous materials.

What is particularly relevant about Pye’s thinking is that it isn’t the “the machine” – that
distinguishes the workmanship of certainty from the workmanship of risk, but the need
for predictability. In truth, the first machines (lathes, levers, gears and jigs) predate the
middle ages. Pye assumes that craft is determined by the jig or hand guided by
instrument. By this definition then, the moment that a tool enters a material (even a hand-
guided material) the initial cut acts as a mechanism. (Pye: p59) Or to put it another way,
the incarnated form that marks the end of one operation is the beginning of the other: a
self-generating material prophesy of the jig resulting in the jig. (Pye: p35) In this sense,
the agency is the material itself.

Pye makes a strong distinction between what is designed and not. In order for something
to be designed it must be the result of an evolutionary process: One that results from
aberration, mutation and adaptability. In this sense, a work is NOT designed if it is
necessarily free of all aberration and potential mutation. In order to provide the
opportunity of mutation, one MUST not only adapt to risk, but even to encourage it.

When we consider the evolution of an artifact however, the workmanship of certainty is
static, whereas the workmanship of uncertainty is most likely to generate innovation.
Like any form of evolution, craft can only advance through mutation. Risk provokes an
evolutionary mutation through the necessitated gesture of reconciliation of accident.
(Pye: p28)

The true genius, then, of the artisan was not reflected in the creation of perfected
geometric ornament. Quite the contrary, in the less-than-ideal situation, geometry and