FROM ART NOUVEAU TO
MODERNISM
Austrian
Proto-Modernism: Adolf Loos
Today I am going to speak about proto-Modernist
archtecture, a very particular period between the decorative art nouveau and
the more austere Modernism proper. This is probably the most turbulent period
of the first half of 20th century architecture in terms of formal
and ideological plurality. Even the same architect or building uses several codes, sometimes contradicting
each other. Austro-Hungarian Proto-Modernism is an expression of different
cultural (ethnic, religious) identities.
This period of transion will be illustrated on
two independent examples:
1.
The
stern and ideological Adolf Loos in Vienna;
2.
The
playful and basically unideological Béla Lajta in Budapest (a city nicknamed
often as Judapest for its large Jewish population, 1910: 23,6%).
Before starting the analysis of Adolf Loos and
Proto-Modernist architecture in general, let me give a survey of 20th
century architecture in terms of ‘stylistic’ periods:
L’ART
NOUVEAU
1900 WW 1 WW
2
1968
1989
2000
PROTOMODERN
EARLY MODERN
LATE MODERN
TRANSITORY
POSTMODERN
______________________________________________________________________________
-decorative
-canonic -pragmatic - social concern - populist
-figurative
-discursive
-discursive - mixed
-figurative
-reproductive -abstract -more
languag.- structuralistic - reproduct
-ample
language -pure language
-more mater. - more
contextual - collage
-colourful/class. -white/unicol. -slight color.- pitched roof - colourful
-insular
-insular -global - less
ubiquitous - insular
-modest
scale -modest scale -huge scale - big hous.devided - modest scale
These periods differ not only in terms of stylistic characteristics, but also in internal structure: while some periods were ideologically and formally more coherent representing a one-channel development, some others were more pluralistic. L’art nouveau was very pluralistic, early modernism was more a one channel development (though this interpretation is more and more challenged by theoreticians today). Proto-Modernism connecting these different epochs might be only pluralistic. In spite of this pluralism, however, there are some common features of Proto-Modernism: some simplified classicism, symmetry, appreciation of the principle of ‘truth to material’.
Adolf Loos
IDEAS and IDEALS
Kenneth
Frampton relates Adolf Loos’ anti-ornamental attitude to Louis Sullivan's
remark: 'It could only benefit us if for
a time we were to abandon ornament and concentrate entirely on the erection of
buildings that were finely shaped and charming in their sobriety'. Frampton
argues that from this Loos developed his radical aesthetic purism, which made
him a zealous foe of Art Nouveau and the German Werkbund: 'The German Werkbund has set out to discover the style of our age. This
is unnecessary labour. We already have the style of our age.'
Although
this is all true, I think that Loos’ purism goes deeper, this is not only an
attitude, but a philosophy that is rooted in the principle of modern
industrialism on the one hand, and on the refusal of carved image from the
Jewish heritage, on the other. Loos was not Jewish, but his environment was
imbued by the Jewish spirit, his most prominent clients were Jews.
In
order to underpin this I am going to quote some parts of his writing Ornament und Verbrechen (Ornament and Crime[1]):
The human embryo in the womb passes through all the evolutionary stages
of the animal kingdom. When man is born, his sensory impressions are like those
of a new-born puppy. His childhood takes him through all the metamorphoses of
human history. At 2 he sees with the
eyes of a Papuan, at 4 with those
of an ancient Teuton, at 6 with those of Socrates, at 8 with
those of Voltaire…
…The child is amoral. To our eyes, the Papuan is too. The Papuan kills
his enemies and eats them. He is not a criminal. But when modern man kills
someone and eats him he is either a criminal or a degenerate. The Papuan tattoos
his skin, his boat, his paddles, in short everything he can lay hands on. He is
not a criminal. The modern man who tattoos himself is either a criminal or a
degenerate…
…The first ornament that was born, the cross, was erotic in
origin. The first work of art, the first artistic act which the first artist,
in order to rid himself of his surplus
energy, smeared on the wall. A horizontal dash: the prone woman. A vertical dash: the man penetrating her. The man
who created it felt the same urge as Beethoven, he was in the same heaven in
which Beethoven created the Ninth
Symphony.
But the man of our day who, in response to an inner urge, smears the
walls with erotic symbols is a criminal or a degenerate. It goes without saying
that this impulse most frequently assails people with such symptoms of degeneracy
in the lavatory. A country's culture can be assessed by the extent to which its
lavatory walls are smeared.
…I have made the following discovery and I pass it on to the world: The
evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from
utilitarian objects.
Perhaps
this is parallel to the process of ‘de-idolisation’[2]
in architecture, the refusal of ‘carved image’. According to Loos, the time for
that has come:
Every age had its style, is our age alone to be refused a style? By style, people meant ornament. Then I said: Weep not! See,
therein lies the greatness of our age,
that it is incapable of producing a new ornament. We have outgrown ornament; we have fought our way through to freedom from ornament. See, the time is nigh, fulfilment awaits us.
Soon the streets of the city will glisten like white walls. Like Zion, the holy city, the capital of heaven. Then fulfilment will be come.
So,
let us see the fulfilment, but before that I would like to linger a bit on
Loos’ biography.
Adolf Loos,
the son of a stonemason, was born in
Brno, Moravia (then Austria-Hungary,
today Czechia), in 1870. Following a technical education at the Royal and
Imperial State Technical College, further studies at the Dresden College of
Technology, he left for the United States in 1893 in order to visit the World's Colombian Exposition in Chicago.
Although he could not work as an architect during his three-year stay in the States,
he nonetheless became familiar with the pioneer achievements of the Chicago School [90], with some writings
of Louis Sullivan, in particular with Sullivan's essay Ornament in Architecture (1892). This influenced his own essay Ornament
und Verbrechen (Ornament and Crime), published sixteen years later.
However, their attitude towards ornament remained different, particularly in
its philosophical backing.
Loos
returned to Vienna in 1896. He
started his career by designing interiors and writing articles for the
liberal Neue Freie Presse, on a
wide variety of topics ranging from clothes to architecture and from manners
to music.
The
famous article Ornament and Crime, was published in 1908. It was a
breakaway from the artists of the Viennese
Secession, an argument that he had
already enjoined by 1900 in the form of an anti-Gesamtkunstwerk fable, 'The Story of a Poor Rich Man'. There
Loos portrayed the fate of a wealthy businessman who had commissioned a
Secessionist architect to design a 'total' house for him, including not only
the furnishings but also the clothes of the occupants.
Once it happened that he was
celebrating his birthday. His wife and children had given him many presents. He
liked their choice immensely and enjoyed it all thoroughly. But soon the
architect arrived to set things right, and to take all the decisions in
difficult questions. He entered the room. The master greeted him with pleasure,
for he had much on his mind. But the architect did not see the man's joy. He
had discovered something quite different and grew pale. 'What kind of slippers
are these you've got on?' he ejaculated painfully. The master of the house
looked at his embroidered slippers. Then he breathed in relief. This time he
felt quite guiltless. The slippers had been made to the architect's original
designs. So he answered in a superior way, 'But Mr Architect! Have you already
forgotten? You yourself designed them!' 'Of course' thundered the architect,
'but for the bedroom! They completely disrupt the mood here with these two
impossible spots of colour. Can't you see that?'
This
quotation applied more to the Belgian artist Henry van de Velde who designed
special clothes for his wife to harmonise with the lines of their house, built
at Uccle in 1895. And not his fellow Viennese architect Joseph Maria Olbrich,
whom he could not bear. Nonetheless, Olbrich remained the essential focus of
Loos's anti-Secessionist attacks throughout the next decade: he was even cited
by name in Ornament and Crime as the progenitor of illegitimate ornament. 'Where will Olbrich's work be in ten years'
time?' wrote Loos.
'Modern ornament has no forebears and no descendants, no past and no future. It is
joyfully welcomed by uncultivated people to whom the true greatness of our time is a closed book, and
after a short time is rejected.'
Frampton
maintains, that Loos's ultimate argument against ornament was not only that it
was wasteful in labour and material, but that it invariably entailed a punitive
form of craft slavery that could only be justified for those to whom the
highest achievements of bourgeois culture were inaccessible for those craftsmen
who could only find their aesthetic fulfilment in the spontaneous creation of
ornament. Loos justified the ornamentation of his bespoke footwear - which he
would have preferred to be plain - in the following terms:
'We go to Beethoven or
Tristan after the cares of the day. My shoemaker can't. I must not take away
his joy as I have nothing to replace it with. But whoever goes to the Ninth
Symphony and then sits down to design a wallpaper is either a rogue or a
degenerate.'
These
challenging ethical and aesthetic statements isolated Loos not only from the
Secession and his conservative contemporaries, but also from his true
successors, those latter-day 'purists' who even now have yet to comprehend
fully the profundity of his insights. As we will see later analysing the
Goldman & Salatsch building in Vienna, he disappointed not only the
conservatives, but the avant-garde as well with his relative conservatism.
In
his critical essay Architektur of
1910 Loos argued, that the architect
from the city was uprooted by definition and hence categorically alienated from the innate
agrarian for alpine vernacular of his
distant forebears, then it followed
that he could not compensate for this loss by pretending to inherit
the aristocratic culture of Western Classicism. For
the urban bourgeoisie - whence he
invariably came and whom he naturally served - were, whatever else they might
be, patently not aristocrats.
However, we must not forget, that good part of that bourgeoisie was of Jewish
origin, a culture basically
anti-ornamental. Loos’ wife was also Jewish and one of his best friends, Peter
Altenberg also.
His
writing on the Ringstrasse published
in 1898, Die potemkinsche Stadt,
should be seen in this light:
Whenever I stroll along the
Ring, I always feel as if a modern Potemkin had wanted to make somebody believe
he had been transported into a city of aristocrats. All that the Italian
Renaissance could produce in noble mansions had been plundered in order to
conjure up for Her Highness the common people a New Vienna, which only people in a position to own an entire palace
from the cellars to the chimneypots could inhabit.... Viennese landlords were
delighted with the idea of owning a mansion and the tenants were equally
pleased to be able to live in one.
Loos's
solution to this dilemma, as posited in Architektur,
was to argue that most modern building tasks were appropriate vehicles for building (Bauen) rather than architecture:
'Only a very small part of architecture belongs to
art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else, everything that serves a
purpose, should be excluded from the realms of art.'
As
Frampton point out, this is going to be a very harming standpoint, rather
conservative, that will be challenged by subsequent modernists, who maintained
that each piece of building environment should be created with the same care.
Loos
maintained that all culture depended on a certain continuity with the past, on
a consensus as to a typification. He could not accept the romantic notion of
the highly gifted individual transcending the historical limits of his own epoch.
This was a very problematic standpoint in his age. Instead of self-conscious
ornamental design, Loos favoured understated dress, anonymous furniture and
efficient plumbing of the Anglo-Saxon middle class having mostly the States in
mind rather than England. In this he anticipated Le Corbusier's notion of the
objet-type, the refined, normative object, spontaneously produced by the
craft-based industries of the society.
This
ideas were highlighted in his writings, advertisements in Loos's short-lived
periodical Das Andere ('The Other')
of 1903, significantly subtitled 'A
Journal for the Introduction of Western Civilisation into Austria'.
Loos’
ideal in this respect was Schinkel,
his self-imposed predicament seems to have been how to combine the informal comfort of the Anglo-Saxon interior with the asperities of Classical form.
WORK
INTERIORS
Loos was working on conversion of existing interiors until
1910: as the interior for Goldman & Salatsch in the Graben (1898) and Kärntner or American Bar of 1907. To the street these works, were finished in elegant, unobtrusive materials, while internally the style varied from the Japanese ambience to the classicized club-room elegance of the Kärntner Bar.
In domestic interiors Loos was even more eclectic,
reflecting the fundamental split in his work between a comfortable rusticity on
the one hand and a severe monumentality on the other. Loos panelled his walls up to picture-rail level in polished stone or wood; above this they were either left blank or topped with an ornamental pattern or Classical frieze in plaster. (In Ornament and Crime, Loos had admitted the eclectic appropriation of archaeological
ornament, while categorically excluding
the invention of modern decoration, i.e. the Sezession.) Ceilings, where public,
were often blank; where private, they were coffered in wood or metal. On other occasions, particularly
in dining spaces, they might be relieved
by Richardsonian timber beams, which were often of grotesque proportions, as in the Steiner House
of 1910. Floors were generally of stone or parquet and always covered
with oriental carpets, while fireplace
surrounds, frequently of brick, stood out in textured contrast
to the highlights invariably provided by vitrines,
mirrors, lamps and sundry metalware.
Furniture was always built in when it was possible.
Otherwise it was selected by the client, although where it was movable and the
building public, Loos restricted himself to standard Thonet bentwood furniture,
as in his somewhat Wagner-like Café Museum of 1899, to be seen even today, on the corner of Operngaße and
Karlsplatz. In his essay on the abolition
of furniture he wrote:
'The walls of a building
belong to the architect. There he rules at will. And as with walls so with any
furniture that is not movable.'
Of
movable pieces he wrote:
'The wrought-iron bedstead,
table and chairs, hassocks and occasional chairs, desks and smoking stands - all
items made by our craftsmen in the modern idiom (never by architects); everyone
may buy these for himself according to his own taste and inclination.'
This
categorical anti-Gesamtkunstwerk
attitude was complemented by Loos's passion for rich materials of which
he wrote in a Semperian way:
'Rich material and good
workmanship should not only be considered as making up for lack of decoration,
but as far surpassing it in sumptuousness.'
HOUSES
The Steiner House, built in Vienna in 1910,
initiated a series of houses in which Loos gradually evolved his conception of
the Raumplan
or 'plan
of volumes', a complex system of internal organisation
that culminated in the split-level
houses realised towards the end of his life: the Moller House in Vienna and the Müller
House near Prague. By the time
of the Steiner House, Loos had already
arrived at a highly abstract external idiom - his white unadorned prism, which anticipated by at least eight years the
so-called 'International Style'.
The Raumplan concept started in Rufer House, Vienna
(1912), where, in contrast to his later houses, the openings are quite freely
disposed, following the free disposition of the internal volumes - an elevational counterpoint
that anticipated the canonical works of De
Stijl.
Loos's Raumplan
peaked in his last domestic works, the Moller and Müller houses of 1928
and 1930. As anticipated in the open
stair hall of the Rufer House, both these works are organised about displacements in the respective levels of their principal
floors, creating spatial movement and
differentiating one living area from
the next.
This attitude resembles a bit late feudal architecture in Japan, that
followed the spiral line of an ikebana. Japanese influence on Loos is
remarkable, but little researched as yet.
Frampton
stresses rather another source: “The typically irregular Gothic Revival plan, documented in Muthesius's Das Englische Haus, clearly inspired
Loos's wholly unprecedented development of the Raumplan, yet with his Classical
predilection for cubic form he could not accept the picturesque massing that was its
natural consequence. From this, no doubt, came the tortuous manipulation of the
available volume of the prism as though it were just so much raw material from
which to create a dynamic composition in section.”
Frampton
underlines in his ‘tectonic considerations’ that “such plastic intentions were
basically incompatible with an
architecture of consistent distinction between structural and non-structural elements, and while Loos
strove to maintain such distinctions in his public work, at a domestic level he
gave primacy to the sensation of space, rather than to
the revelation of architectonic
structure. The principles of Viollet-le-Duc were in any event alien to him,
since he deliberately contorted plans for the sake of providing an architectural
promenade of sensual significance as Le Corbusier was to do.
In almost all his domestic work structural
junctions are invariably masked
by revetment either with the aim of
hiding unresolved conditions or out of a desire to provide an appropriate level
of decorum.” (K. Frampton: Modern Architecture — A Critical History)
From
1920 to 1922, Loos was chief architect to the Housing Department of Vienna, in the austere aftermath of the war.
Loos applied his as yet undeveloped Raumplan
to the problem of mass housing. The
result was a number of remarkable housing studies, in which his preferred form, the cube, became transformed into a stepped terrace section. In 1920 he designed
a brilliant and economical housing scheme, known as the Heuberg Estate. Terrace houses were integrated with greenhouses
and allotments, in which the occupants were expected to grow their own food - a
typical urban survival strategy of the inflationary post-war period, which
became adopted as general policy in many German housing settlements during the
1920s.
Loos,
the bourgeois architect and man of taste, was able to create his most sensitive
larger projects in the service of the underprivileged. Nevertheless, this did
not last long, he resign as housing
architect in 1922 and migrated to Paris, at the invitation of the Dadaist
poet Tristan Tzara.
Loos
designed for Tzara a house in 1926. In the French capitol he became
part of the fashionable world that
surrounded the dancer Josephine Baker,
for whom he designed a rather ostentatious villa
in 1928. Save for Tzara and his old
Viennese client, the internationally famous
tailor Kniže, for whom he had first designed a store in Vienna in 1909,
none of his Parisian patrons had either the resources or the faith to realise
any of the large-scale projects that he designed during his expatriate years.
In 1928 Loos returned to Vienna,
dying five years later.
__________________________________________
SLIDES
Kärtner
Bar (today:
American Bar)
1908, Wien
The minimal space 4,45 x 6,15 m is visually
extended via the ‘hypetral’ windows — mirrors that extend the interior. Onix
and other fine materials make the narrow space appear rich. The seeds of the Raumplan are already visible — the way to the toillet.
Schneidersalon
Kniže (Tailor's Shop)
1910-13, Wien
Stone, timber, the slight Japanese touch. The
curved profile of the black granite recalls a bit the Baroque.
Goldman & Salatsch Haus (today: Looshaus) in Michaelerplatz.
1909-1911, Wien
It is scarcely conceivable to the modern
observer of the Looshaus that this building not only evoked rage in both court
and public, but also led to cancellation
by the authorities and gave the architect stomach ulcers. Like
many houses built in the city centre between 1900 and 1910 show it must have
been not so much the modern architecture
that caused all the protests than the place
in which it dared to emerge. Loos’ ingenuous argument must have seemed
doubly provocative as far as the Hofburg was concerned when he confronted blossoming neo-baroque — the
Maria-Theresa style — with the rationalism that was intended to instruct
and inform and the Biedermeier tradition of the period of the Emperor Joseph,
which had both led to revolutions with the aid of an archaic classicism. Thus the problem of the effect made by the
Looshaus lies in the fact that Loos,
amid the loquaciousness of late historicism, appealed to the middle-class
virtues of Biedermeier and also questioned the clichés of modernism that had already
developed by attempting to anchor the building in the classic Viennese
tradition. It was the dialectic of
traditionalism and modernism and a high degree of sensitivity as far as
linguistic problems were concerned, that united the circle of friends around
Loos (Kraus, Altenberg, Schoenberg, Kokoschka, Trakl etc.) and were
difficult for contemporaries to understand. Loos built a pure iron-skeleton building of the kind the city had already accepted, but he hid the
framework behind a rendered façade, to the extent that it is not even possible
to work out that the four marble columns are not load-bearing. The much criticised axial leap — between the
columns and the window pier — should have given food for thought, it was,
like the monoliths “set on a crack”, a
sign of the actual structural situation.
While the austere and undecorated rendered
facade with “holes” cut out
intensifies fitting bourgeois silence vis-à-vis the monarch, and was also taken
like that, the base — to the
annoyance of the moderns, who would have dissolved this into glass — displayed the full seriousness of
representation for an unholy purpose, a tailor’s shop. Here neo-classical
Vienna entered into a dialogue with the world, which for a gentleman’s
outfitter would be London, in which clothing was accepted as an expression of
culture. Loos also packed another
invention into the base, the spatial plan, an organisation of interior space that was readable from the outside,
which was an additional source of
confusion. And so Loos’ serious building that seems, in its simple polarity of silence and speech to be
delivering a lecture on Vienna’s
architectural-cultural situation around 1910, in reality has radical
criticism of this situation built into it. Indeed he went so far as to demonstrate
the avant-garde standard of a modern skeleton
building, which would have done credit to Gropius or Mies, in the courtyard, while on the street side he drew the line of a
Biedermeier cornice edge, so as not
to offend against the “spirit of the city”. But this plunge into history
did not go so far as to give the Biedermeier body of the building Biedermeier
windows, he used metropolitan “gallows windows” (later particularly denigrated
by the Nazis) because they represented structural improvement in comparison
with older structures. But one should not forget that the Looshaus was the keystone
in a city square that had been completely transformed from 1888 by the building
of the inner Burgtor section, the demolition of the old Burgtheater, the
“Stöckl” and the Dreilauferhaus, and that in the consciousness of the Viennese,
conformity with the Hofburg (e.g. Palais Herberstein) was in the forefront. But
the fact that Loos’ invention enhanced the value of the older elements of
square like the façade of the Michaelerkirche and the Grosses Michaelerhaus, indeed
rescued them by taking a formal dialogue, but because of the dynamic change the
square this could not yet be perceived.
In the case of the Looshaus it would be
possible to assert that Loos used the elements of the city as he perceived them
in urban development tradition, the demands modernism makes on a major city and
its cultural links (London, Chicago etc.) as universals in order to create a
new uniform reference system and explain this as an absolute.
Steiner Haus,
1910,
Wien
Limited
hight on the street side, the big hight on the garden side characterise this
extraordinary house. While the street façade and the façade towards the garden
are symmetric, the side façades are fully assymetric. The windows are placed irregularly
speaking about the interior behind. On the garden façade the windows of
consequtive stories are vertical and horizontal, anticipating a play common in
Modernism proper. Minimalism characterises the façades, the absence of any decoration.
The building is shocking with its ‘ugliness’.
Haus Scheu,
Wien,
1912-13
The
first terrace structure by Loos resembling a bit the idea of the Arab village,
that will come up in the Weißenhof Siedlung in Stuttgart. Play with the
windows.
Maison Tristan Tzara,
Paris
1926
The
façade is divided into two parts: the lower part in stone, the upper part in
plaster. Both are characterised by a strong symmetry. In contrast to this
simmetry, however, the windows are quite different. The entrance resembles a
bit the Baroque concave line of the Goldman & Salatsch building, of course
in smaller scale and rectified. The balcony of the firsts floor is in the same
recess. The loggia above is two stories high and repeats the square shape of
the upper part. A façade is play contrasting the open and the closed. The
interior is a succesful Raumplan that is also justified by the difference
between the street- and courtyard-level.
Villa Moller
Wien
1927-28
The
masterpiece with the full realisation of the Raumplan — the protruding box is part of the interior composition belonging
to living room. The Moller Villa units the modernist purism and the symmetry
and thoughly proportioned composition of Classicism.
Villa Karma
Loos'
most important contributions are the interiors that recall a bit traditional
Japanese architecture — dark built-in timber furniture, strong timber beams on
the ceiling. Only the dining room resembles Viennese architecture, most Joseph
Hoffmann's interiors.
Two examples of the Loosian Classicism, both just projects:
Warenhaus
Stern, Alexandria
Der
Plan von Wien
Summary
Let
me quote Frampton:
“In
the final analysis Loos's significance as a pioneer depended not only on his
extraordinary insights as a critic of modern culture, but also on his
formulation of the Raumplan as an architectural strategy for transcending
the contradictory cultural legacy of bourgeois society which, having deprived itself of the vernacular, could not claim in exchange the culture of Classicism.
No one was better prepared to receive this hyperconscious sensibility than the
post-war Parisian avant guard, in particular the circle editing L'Esprit
Nouveau, namely the proto-Dadaist poet Paul Dermée and the Purist
painters Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (Le
Corbusier), who in 1920 reprinted the 1913 French translation of Ornament and Crime. And while (as Reyner Banham has observed) the roots of Purism lay in the abstract
classicizing tendencies of Parisian culture, notwithstanding the 'ready-made'
sensibility of Marcel Duchamp, there is little reason to doubt
that the influence of Loos was decisive in refining the typological
programme of Purism; that impulse to synthesise, at every conceivable scale, the
'typeobjects' of the modern world.
Above all, Loos must now be seen as the first to postulate the problem
that Le Corbusier was eventually to resolve with his full development of the free plan. The typological issue posited by Loos was how to combine the propriety
of Platonic mass with the convenience
of irregular volume. This proposition was never more lyrically stated than in
his 1923 project for a villa on the Lido in Venice; and this house was destined
to become the type-form for Le Corbusier's canonical Purist villa, his villa at
Garches of 1927.”
____________________________________________________________
Further
quotations from Ornament und Verbrechen:
Among
ourselves there are unmodern people even in the cities, stragglers from the
eighteenth century, who are horrified by a picture with purple shadows because
they cannot yet see purple. The pheasant on which the chef has been working all
day long tastes better to them and they prefer the cigarette case with
Renaissance ornaments to the smooth one. And what is it like in the country?
Clothes and household furniture all belong to past centuries. The peasant isn't
a Christian, he is still a pagan.
The
ornamentor has to work twenty hours to achieve the income earned by a modern
worker in eight. Ornament generally increases the cost of an article,
nevertheless it happens that an ornamented object whose raw material cost the
same and which demonstrably took three times as long to make is offered at half
the price of a smooth object. Omission of ornament results in a reduction in
the manufacturing time and an increase in wages. The Chinese carver works for
sixteen hours, the American worker for eight. If I pay as much for a smooth cigarette
case as for an ornamented one, the difference in the working time belongs to
the worker. And if there were no ornament at all - a situation that may perhaps
come about in some thousands of years - man would only have to work four hours
instead of eight, because half of the work done today is devoted to ornament.
Ornament is wasted labour power and hence wasted health. It has always been
so.
The
modern man who holds ornament sacred as a sign of the artistic superabundance
of past ages will immediately recognize the tortured, strained, and morbid
quality of modern ornaments. No ornament can any longer be made today by anyone
who lives on our cultural level.
The
nomadic herdsmen had to distinguish themselves by various colours; modern man
uses his clothes as a mask. So immensely strong is his individuality that it
can no longer be expressed in articles of clothing. Freedom from ornament is a
sign of spiritual strength. Modern man uses the ornaments of earlier or alien
cultures as he sees fit. He concentrates his own inventiveness on other things.