“Ornamented objects appear truly unaesthetic if they have been executed in the best material, with the highest degree of meticulous detail, and if they have required a long production time… The Modern man who holds ornamentation sacred as the sign of artistic achievement of past epochs will immediately recognize the tortured, laboriously extracted and pathological nature of modern ornament.”
The ornament of a savage tribe, being the result of a natural instinct, is necessarily always true to its purpose; whilst in much of the ornament of civilized nations… the ornament is oftentimes misapplied, and instead of first seeking the most convenient form and adding beauty, all beauty is destroyed by superadding ornament to ill contrived form. If we would return to a more healthy condition, we must even be as little children or as savages; we must get rid of the acquired and artificial, and return to and develop natural instincts.”
Excerpted from Ornament and Crime, 1908, but Viennese architect Adolf Loos, as written by Marian Bantjes in her book I Wonder.
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