Ornament and Crime

The collection of essays by Austrian architect Adolf Loos (1870–1933) brings together key works written by him at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. In the titular text, the author declares ornament to be a "crime" for a civilized person and culture. The radical nature of his ideas is based on a rejection of ornamentation and a return to functional and constructive truth. Loos mocks the "Potemkin" facades of Vienna and calls for simplicity, which is equivalent to true nobility. In Loos's categorical texts, aesthetic decisiveness blends with conservative rigor in form. These essays, based not on theoretical dogmas but on manifestos and polemical fervor, anticipated the ideas of modernism and laid the foundations for 20th-century design.