Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays. (Studies in Austrian Literature, Culture, and Thought. Translation Series)

Ornament and Crime contains thirty-six original essays by the celebrated Viennese architect, Adolf Loos (1870-1933). Most deal with questions of design in a wide range of areas, from architecture and furniture, to clothes and jewelery, pottery, plumbing, and printing; others are polemics on craft education and training, and on design in general. Loos, the great cultural reformer and moralist in the history of European architecture and design was always a 'revolutionary against the revolutionaries'. With his assault on Viennese arts and crafts and his conflict with bourgeois morality, he managed to offend the whole country. His 1908 essay 'Ornament and Crime', mocked by an age in love with its accessories, has come to be recognized as a seminal work in combating the aesthetic imperialism of the turn of the century. Today Loos is recognized as one of the great masters of modern architecture.