Did Adolf Loos's own richly finished interiors, in travertine, cipollino marble and mahogany, contradict the argument against ornament that Ornament and Crime makes, or is decoration in expensive natural material a different thing from applied ornament in his own terms?
Loos's polemic attacks applied, imitative ornament, carved or molded decoration added to a surface, while his built interiors, the Villa Muller in Prague among them, are finished throughout in costly veined stone and fine wood chosen expressly for their natural pattern and color. Some historians read this as fully consistent with his stated position, since the material itself is left plain and unworked rather than carved into applied decoration; others read it as the polemic's absolutism failing to survive contact with his own practice, arguing that a client experiencing a room sheathed in book-matched marble is having exactly the sensory, expensive, status-marking experience the essay claims to reject. Both readings appear in the architectural-history literature and neither has settled the question.
What would resolve this A close comparison of Loos's own later writing about specific interiors against the built rooms themselves, room by room, testing whether he offers a consistent principle distinguishing plain natural material from ornament, or whether the distinction is asserted rather than argued.
Architectural History, Design TheoryBanister Fletcher, edited by Dan Cruickshank (20th edition), Sir Banister Fletcher's A History of Architecture