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

We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org

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