About Buildings + Cities

34 — Adolf Loos's 'Ornament and Crime' — Bathroom Kink

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Adolf Loos’s essay ‘Ornament and Crime’ (1910) is considered the classic modernist polemic against the frills and folderols of the established arts of the day.

We're in the city of Freud — and the neurotic subtext is very close to the surface.

We discuss a little of Loos’s career as an architectural iconoclast, jersey fanatic, and pervert :-/

Then we go on to a more freeform discussion of ornament in the contemporary, during which we massively contradict ourselves several times.

We discussed — 

  • Freud Nietzsche Hegel Darwin
  • Louis Sullivan
  • Mrs Beeton
  • English Free Building — Hermann Muthesius
  • Peter Behrens
  • Karl Friedrich Schinkel
  • Joseph Maria Olbrich
  • Henry van der Velde
  • Joseph Hoffmann
  • Josephine Baker’s 'Banana Dance'
  • The black granite bathroom at Villa Karma
  • (On the subject of reprehensible characters) Albert Speer

    • Contemporary ornamenters — 

    • Caruso St John
    • Farshid Moussavi & her book on facades

      • Music — 

      • Victor Sylvester and his Ballroom Orchestra ‘Vienna, City of my Dreams’
      • The Three Suns ‘Alt Wien’ (1949)
      • Philharmonic Orchestra Berlin ‘Von Wien durch die Welt'
      • Oldbrig's zither trio ‘Wien bliebt Wien’
        • All from archive.org

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        About Buildings + CitiesBy Architecture, History + Culture, with Luke Jones & George Gingell