Criminal Skins: Tattoos and Modern Architecture in the Work of Adolf Loos

摘要

It is a truism that modern design and architecture were characterized by a thorough elimination of ornament. The question that we have attempted to broach here is what exactly became constituted as ornamental and why. A variety of discourses from evolutionary theory, natural history and criminal anthropology defined ornament in art and architectural theory. Slippages from physiognomies to Gebrauchsgegenstande revealed places where ornament was defined both scientifically and architecturally. These slippages, and the definitions of ornamentation produced by them, continued to affect architecture long after nineteenth-century criminology was abandoned. Science and architecture converged in the concept of the tattoo, whose ambiguous status — on the body yet external to it — made it interstitial to both of these disciplines. Semper's, Riegl's and Loos's uses of the concept of tattoo revealed how theories of ornamentation were defined alongside discourses on tattooing used in evolutionary theory and criminal anthropology. Scientists and art historians investigated, at the same time, the physiognomy of the human body and of its material culture.