Ornament and Crime

The essay was written when Art Nouveau, known as Secession in Austria and which Loos had excoriated even at its height in 1900, was showing a new way forward for modern art. The essay is important in articulating some moralizing views, inherited from the Arts and Crafts movement, which would be fundamental to the Bauhaus design studio and would help define the ideology of modernism in architecture.

In the essay, Loos explains his philosophy, describing how ornamentation can have the effect of causing objects to go out of style and thus become obsolete. It struck him that it was a crime to waste the effort needed to add ornamentation,…