B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

Ornament is anything but superficial. It’s a deadly serious business: the means with which cultures and individuals define themselves. Tattoos, camouflage, acanthus leaves and graffiti all qualify as ornament.

So did the pattern on the pages of the newly emerged state of Slovenia’s passports in 1992. Rather than using the conventional pastiche of a nineteenth-century banknote engraving employed by most passport designers to deter counterfeiters, Miljenko Licul took an ordnance survey contour map of Mount Triglav, the highest peak in the new country, tore it into fragments and made it the basis of a collage. It was ornament in the sense that a nineteenth-century critic would have recognized it. Even though it was disruptive of the design language traditionally associated with its purpose, it was a decorative scheme that referred to its national roots for inspiration.

Over the centuries, style (which is the signature of a visual language) has mostly been defined by ornament. What made the nineteenth century different from any previous period in history was the emergence of a need to rethink that connection. Ornament was once the way that individual craftsmen could make their personal contribution to a larger idea. Machines put an end to that personal link.

For some critics, creating a new underpinning for ornament became a vitally important issue. Without it, the modern world could not be entirely defined, or entirely complete. For others, the end of handwork was the chance for modernity to define itself, not with the right kind of ornament but with no ornament at all.

Owen Jones, one of the key figures behind the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the establishment of the Victoria and Albert Museum, produced a definitive encyclopaedia on the subject, entitled The Grammar of Ornament. He formulated the idea that, as he put it, ‘Construction should be decorated. Decoration should never be purposely constructed.’ In other words, function, while it comes first, must be properly dressed if it is to achieve basic standards of good manners. But decoration for the sake of decoration is, in itself, even more unseemly that its complete absence.

More than a century later, in the 1970s, when Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, the architects of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, chose to paint the pipes that were left exposed on the side of the building that erupted into the Paris streetscape they were following, most likely unconsciously, Owen Jones’s ideas.

The puritanical streak that runs through contemporary architecture moved them to try to find a functional alibi for the colour scheme that they chose. They adopted the conventional rendering system used by engineers: water-carrying pipes are green, electricity cables are yellow, and so on. To render these ducts and pipes in this way serves no practical purpose. It is as wilful as painting flowers or clouds on them, but it mitigates the appearance of being subjective and sentimental. It could be called decorated construction.

Owen Jones’s most accomplished protégé, Christopher Dresser, perhaps the world’s first industrial designer in the modern sense, argued in a lecture delivered to the Royal Society of Arts in 1871 that ‘true ornamentation is of purely mental origin, and consists of symbolized imagination only. Ornamentalism is not only fine art … it is high art … even a higher art than that practised by the pictorial artist, as it is of wholly of mental origin.’ He was saying that decoration had moved out of the realm of the crafts, and had become an intellectual concept rather than a subjective one. Dresser, who had studied botany as well as design, looked for analogies with nature to provide him with intellectual ammunition. It is a position that had a historical aspect: the architectural orders have a strong botanical content, from acanthus leaves to papyrus. But botany and natural forms also seemed to offer an important lesson for contemporary design. Dresser suggested that there was nothing superfluous in nature, where everything is beautiful, and everything has a simplicity of form and a clear function. He tried to apply the same principle to design.

Dresser had a number of roles: working as a designer, as a consultant to manufacturers, as a critic and as a teacher. He declared that ‘as an ornamentalist, I have much the largest practice in the kingdom’, and produced designs for wallpaper, textiles, stained glass, ceramics and metalware.

Dresser was a remarkably inventive designer, who worked in a wide variety of media and had an impressive formal range. His ceramic, glass and metal domestic objects were startlingly original. They seemed to have no connection to any historical period nor, in many cases, any obvious connection to natural forms. The teapot that he designed for the Birmingham manufacturer James Dixon, in 1879, had no applied decoration of any kind; it was an exercise in pure geometric form that would have looked new sixty years later and still seems bold today. Dresser was one of a number of people who were looking to find specifically modern forms of ornament. Gottfried Semper, exiled temporarily to London in 1850 and 1851, set about formulating his architectural theories there. And in Vienna Josef Hoffmann and Adolf Loos engaged in a somewhat onesided debate about ornament. Both came from Moravia, went to the same schools, and moved to Vienna at about the same time. They had much more in common than the violence of Loos’s polemics would suggest. At first, Loos had to confess a certain difficulty with writing about Hoffmann. In 1898, he claimed: ‘I am utterly opposed to the direction being taken today by young artists, and not only in Vienna. For me tradition is everything - the free reign of the imagination takes second place. Here we have an artist with an exuberant imagination who can successfully attack the old traditions, and even I have to admit that it works.’

But when Hoffmann established the Wiener Werkstätte, an enterprise that Loos characterized as making work for the daughters of the rich, the gloves really came off. The bitterness that Loos showed towards Hoffmann may have had more to do with the sharpness of professional jealousy than a genuine ideological gulf.

Loos was certainly the more gifted writer of the two. But perhaps it was his very brilliance with words that overshadowed a better understanding of his meaning. His most famous text, Ornament and Crime, is a more nuanced and subtle argument about the nature of contemporary visual culture than the bald but attention-grabbing headline would suggest. The piece needs to be understood against the background of the cultural politics of Vienna, a city which Otto Wagner, a supporter of both Loos and Hoffmann, had rebuilt. Hoffmann was better at securing work, Loos was the more effective, and the more brutal, of polemicists: the Rem Koolhaas to Hoffmann’s Norman Foster, perhaps.

Much of Ornament and Crime is not the full-frontal assault on applied decoration that the title suggests. The battle for simplicity, as the text claims, had already been won. It had historical inevitability on its side. In fact it’s a critique of Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser’s Wiener Werkstätte, the company that they set up to manufacture tiny numbers of exquisite objects in a contemporary manner, and their rediscovery of ornament. Their manifesto claimed that:

The immeasurable harm caused in the realm of arts and crafts by shoddy mass production on the one hand, and mindless imitation of old styles on the other, has swept through the entire world like a huge flood. We have lost touch with the culture of our forebears and we are tossed about by a thousand contradictory whims and demands. In most cases the machine has replaced the hand and the businessman has taken the craftsman’s place. It would be madness to swim against this current. Usefulness is our first requirement and our strength has to lie in good proportions and materials well handled. We will seek to decorate but without any compulsion to do so and certainly not at any cost. The work of the art craftsman is to be measured by the same yardstick as that of the painter and the sculptor.

Loos was just as much a believer in usefulness, good proportions and materials well handled. But Hoffmann’s view of decoration as a kind of art gave Loos an opening in which to slip in his assassin’s stiletto.

Loos claimed to have brought the world a vitally important message. ‘The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects.’ He had brought the gospel to set men free, and then, as Loos saw it, up popped Hoffmann attempting to reinvent ornament for the modern world by pretending that it was art. Loos clearly had a problem with decoration. Talking about food, he suggested: ‘The show dishes of past centuries, which employ all kinds of ornaments to make the peacocks and pheasants and lobsters look more tasty, have exactly the opposite effect on me … I am horrified when I go through a cookery exhibition and think I am meant to eat these stuffed carcasses. I eat roast beef.’

But he was not unaware of what he was demanding of his contemporaries. Loos was asking them to give up the attempt to make their own mark on history, to make their own style. Ornament, for them, meant style. Modern style, he was saying, is the obligation to make no style at all.

We have outgrown it. We are at the stage when we prefer a plain cigarette case to an ornamented one. If I want to eat gingerbread, I choose one that is quite smooth and not a piece representing a heart or a baby or a rider and which is covered all over in ornament. Ornament does not heighten my joy in life, or the joy in life of any cultivated person.

In the Loos view, his opponents based their case on ersatz spiritual values and fake art.

It wasn’t just Hoffmann that Loos was targeting. The Belgian architect van de Velde was the subject of the mockery of Loos’s essay ‘The Poor Little Rich Man’.

A tattoo is an ornament; only criminals and degenerates wear tattoos; therefore ornament is a sign of criminality is the sledgehammer-subtle thrust of his case against applied ornament. But there is much more to Loos’s ideas about decoration than the headlines would suggest. Mass production changed everything for Loos. It means that ‘ornament is no longer organically linked with our culture. It is no longer an expression of us.’

He suggests that mass production makes design democratic, and asserts the economic case, both for the consumer and the worker. ‘Ornament is no longer a natural product of our culture, as a result, the work of the ornamenter is no longer adequately remunerated. Ornamented plates are expensive, the white crockery from which a modern man likes to eat is cheap,’ he suggests, not entirely accurately. Simplicity has turned out, in the version developed for the minimalist taste of the twenty-first century, to be anything but cheap.

Loos was prescient enough to use political arguments to support his position. Ornament was not so much an aesthetic crime as an economic one, he states in Ornament and Crime: ‘The enormous damage and devastation caused in aesthetic development by the revival of ornament would be easily made light of, for no one, not even the power of the state, can halt mankind’s evolution … But it is a crime against the national economy that it should result in a waste of human labour.’ Loos claims that he is not a ruthless puritan, attempting to take away the simple pleasures of the craftsman. At one point in the essay he says: ‘I am preaching to the aristocrat, not the revolutionary. The aristocrat among atheists will lift his hat passing a church. The aristocrat of taste well understands the old lady who crochets her wonderful things with glass beads and silk, the aristocrat lets them be, the revolutionary would say it’s all nonsense.’

It’s designers he has in his sights. They, like he, have higher outlets for their inspirations, craftsmen do not. So, as Loos put it: ‘[A]nyone who goes to the Ninth Symphony and then sits down and designs a wallpaper pattern is either a confidence trickster or a degenerate … Beethoven’s symphonies would never have been written by a man who had to walk about in silk, satin, and lace. Anyone who goes around in a velvet coat today is not an artist but a buffoon or a house painter.’

There is another, much more pragmatic interpretation of decoration than Jones or Loos put forward. It is to find a functional justification for its application. Decoration and ornament are devices that have always been used to conceal the imperfections of workmanship and manufacturing. In traditional building practice, it is the joints between different surfaces and materials that are embellished to hide any construction defects. When a plaster wall meets a wooden floor, the two materials will have been installed by different people who have different skills. To make the bottom edge of a coat of plaster exactly straight for the whole length of the wall is as difficult for the plasterer as it is for the joiner installing the floorboards to ensure that every plank of wood ends up aligned exactly with every other plank, to provide a perfectly smooth and even surface. Applied decoration accepts this level of imperfection. It gives enough latitude for it not to matter because the uneven gap between plaster and wood is hidden by a more or less ornate skirting board. A cornice does the same job at the point at which the ceiling meets the top of a wall. Drawing attention to skirtings and cornices by decorating them makes it apparent that they are the result of a deliberate aesthetic decision, not a random afterthought. The way that a keyhole fits into a door, or a light switch sits on a wall, requires a similar consideration of how the work to accommodate them will actually be done.

It is, given enough skill, possible to do without a skirting board. They are visually intrusive, and so in the context of the art gallery, and later the domestic interior, came the idea of the shadow gap. To avoid a background element that distracts from looking at art, either on the wall, or on the floor, the skirting is omitted altogether. Instead the plaster is made with great care to stop just short of the floor. And the floorboards with equal care appear to disappear in an even line under the plaster. Conceptually both vertical and horizontal planes are uninterrupted. There is no decorated skirting detail. But it could be argued that the almost invisible shadow gap is in itself a kind of ornament. It is certainly as punishingly hard to get right as the most accomplished of decorative flourishes.

The sign of modernity has become as complete an absence of applied ornament as possible. Pattern is permitted only if it comes from the inherent nature of materials, such as the onyx and travertine that Mies van der Rohe used for the Barcelona Pavilion, or the rust of Corten steel on the exterior of a skyscraper.

The motor industry works in the same pragmatic way as a builder. The details of how the components are put together is designed to make it easier to build a car, rather than more difficult. They smooth over the visual imperfections of the manufacturing process rather than draw attention to them. Look at the windscreen of an average Ford, for example, and you will very likely see a pattern of dots printed on the glass around its edges. The dots are there to make the inevitably uneven line of the gasket that makes the watertight gap between the glass and the metal of the car body into which it is fitted look less obvious.

The dots have no practical purpose, but they have become part of a car’s ornamental scheme. Most cars no longer have a self-consciously decorative hood ornament, but the complex curves of a car body have also taken on a decorative role. These are shapes that appeal in part because they are difficult to do (and so have become the signifiers of quality) but also because of how they look. The arrays of lights and the back and front of a vehicle are also elements that the designer has to work with, along with the radiator grille, the door handles and the applied graphics. Car designers call them jewellery.

For contemporary mass-produced domestic appliances, decoration is almost exclusively based on functional alibis. It comes in the way that it is used in Dyson vacuum cleaners and to introduce a dash of colour in the citrus-coloured generation of iBooks from Apple.

It is, though not in a way that he would have welcomed, the vindication of Adolf Loos. Ornament is not art. But it may also be responsible for another phenomenon that he would have been even less enthusiastic about - the way that we decorate our utilitarian possessions after they have left the factory. We keep our smartphones in leopard-skin plastic sleeves, we attach plastic figurines to the handles of our suitcases and we cover them in stickers. It is as if we tattoo our possessions as well as ourselves. It is perhaps a measure of the continuing hunger for ornamentation that people have to make their mark on their possessions and their surroundings.