Ornament and Crime by Adolf Loos

From reading Adolf Loos’s “Ornament and Crime”, for him decoration is committing crime, unnecessary and symbolize the old fashion in the past. Ornaments are not needed in the modern time lifestyle. His thinking is somehow connected to Mies van der Rohe relating to the phrase “less is more”. But the phrase “less is more’ doesn’t really work thoroughly. Being less ornamented does mean that it is the best architecture or the best design, but its up to the style of the architecture, so some that are heavily decorated or the ones that are really plain could both become the right answer.

In my opinion “ornament is a crime” is not completely wrong. It depends on what aspect what style does ornament involve in. I’m not saying that what Loos says in the book was totally right or wrong. There are some points that I agree with him about representing a crime against the national economy, human labour, money and materials. Sometimes we spend too much time and money on thing that are unnecessary just to make us satisfy.

Anyway this is not to say that ornamentation is junk or useless in a way. There are many different other advantages that ornamentation create for us. Only that we use them in a proper way just enough to fulfill our demands.

From Bauhaus to Our House 1st

After I have read “From Bauhaus to Our House” by Tom Wolfe, I found a new interesting way look at modernism architecture. The whole book “From Bauhaus to Our House” is referring to only one viewpoint, which is the author’s. He barely has knowledge about architecture, he wasn’t an architect either. He criticize about how architectures from the beginning transform into modernism architecture in the presents. Starting off with good expression in the beginning was quite joyful, suddenly Wolfe started to complain about now days civilization.

During reading sometimes I feel that maybe this man’s head is still stuck in the original way and style of architecture, but for me sometimes architects don’t need to decorate or focus on the details that much. Maybe he’s saying that modern architecture is boring, yes! Sometimes modern architectures can become bored with the steel, glass, concrete and the non-decorating, but I think those materials and those designs create their own identity also creating the functions in the building.