Dressing down: Adolf Loos and the politics of ornament

摘要

This paper begins to suggest what might happen to ornament under the Modernist reign of abstraction and rationality. Rather than accepting the usual understanding of ornament as a category outside of modernist aesthetics, rejected by its criticism, it suggests that within the development of Modernism (and a 'pre-Modernist' position to which Loos would belong), ornament was a much more complicated and knotty question. The ideological motivations for a reform of the role of ornament, played out by Loos through clothing and objects of everyday use as well as architecture, and appropriated by Le Corbusier, had a significant effect on the history of architecture.