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Adorno’s Reception of Loos.

Modern Architecture, Aesthetic Theory, and the Critique of Ornament

Daniel Sherer

In Walter Benjamin’s essay on Karl Kraus (1931) Adolf Loos is given the
role of “comrade in arms” to the Viennese satirist and moral thinker.
Benjamin observes that just as Loos’ sought to separate the work of art
from objects of daily use, so too Kraus maintained a distance between
the spheres of art and information. Benjamin elaborates: “in his heart,
the hack journalist is at one with the ornamentalist.” Apart from these
cursory, and on the whole, rather understated observations, and a brief
quotation of Loos at the end of the essay stressing the noble, human and
wholly natural character of a mode of work that consists entirely of
destruction, quite illuminating when applied to Kraus, Benjamin’s
assessment of the Viennese architect and critic is incidental to the main
thrust of his analysis, whose primary subject is the philosophy of
language of Kraus the apocalyptic satirist. Although Loos and Kraus are
seen as offering a genuine parallel, it is evident that any discussion of
Loos could be dispensed with without compromising the argument.
And although this parallel situates the satirist and the architect/theorist
within a specific cultural field--early 20th century Vienna seen as an
artistic laboratory for the modern era--at least as far as Benjamin is
concerned, the supporting role that Loos is given can be seen as
symptomatic. It shows above all that Loos was not a central figure in
Benjamin’s cultural universe, even if in a subsequent essay, “Experience
and Poverty” (1933), he is cast as a forerunner of modern architecture
and as an epitome of modernist sensibility.

Loos was of greater interest to Adorno, who explored the aesthetic

implications of the Viennese architect’s critique of ornament in his essay
“Functionalism Today” and in important passages in the Aesthetic
Theory in addition to a number of other texts. It is surprising, therefore,
to find that in contrast to Benjamin’s interpretation of Loos, scholarly
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discussion of Adorno’s reading of this protagonist of modern

architecture and thought is far from extensive. In what follows I shall
attempt to fill in this lacuna by examining some aspects of the reception
of Loos in Adorno’s aesthetic theory that have not received the attention
they deserve. Loos, in fact, was a decisive point of reference for Adorno:
his cultural criticism shaped Adorno’s approach to modern architecture
and to questions of ornament from the mid to late 1960’s, even if the
roots of his interest in Loos date back to the mid-1920’s when Adorno
studied composition in Vienna with Alban Berg. More specifically,
Loos’s anti-ornament polemic provided an important critical premise for
Adorno’s reflections on the dichotomy of function and form, an aspect
of aesthetic experience that proved to be equally significant for his
theory of art, his critique of modern architecture, and his evolving
understanding of the relation of technological development to the
ideology of progress. Although Adorno adopted crucial dimensions of
Loos’ position, he also reframed Loos’s views on ornament historically
and critically, subsuming them within an argument that differs in key
respects from Loos’s own.

Vienna and Echternach: Ornament and the Dialectic of Progress

In both the 1965 essay, “Functionalism Today” and in the Aesthetic

Theory of 1969 Loos’s exposé of ornament is presented as an epitome of
modern critical discourse and as a turning point in the historical
unfolding of a form of cultural criticism which Adorno himself
inherited. As far as architecture is concerned, the most salient point of
critical engagement for Adorno is with the concept of functionalism. To
the extent that Adorno considered ornament to be an obstacle to the
clear articulation of function in accordance with Loos’ critical stance, he
too was obliged to regard its removal as progressive and, in many ways,
a necessary step.

But in Adorno, as in Loos, things are never that simple, in the first
instance because of the former’s propensity to read Hegel against the
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grain: no teleology of any kind is available to the negative dialectician

who takes his critical task seriously, which, among other things,
presupposes the rejection of all closed systems. A crucial aspect of this
task is to expose the ideological deceptions and false alternatives
traditionally used to buttress the aesthetic domain--in short, to probe the
shaky foundations on which the house of culture is built. Combining, in
dialectical fashion, sociological considerations and an immanent
aesthetic standpoint, Adorno, in the Aesthetic Theory, was the first to
recognize that a basic presupposition of the aesthetic system constructed
by Hegel, the idea of an ever closer approximation to metaphysical truth
effected by artistic progress as art is “sublated” into philosophy--the
famous Hegelian “death of art”—becomes questionable, and even
absurd, at a moment, such as our own, when modern art enters a
historical phase in which it is obliged to face the consequences of
universal regression.

In Minima Moralia the idea of political and social progress fares no

better: in that text the march of the Hegelian World Spirit is derisively
contrasted to the Echternachtertanz, a folkdance in the village of
Echternach in Luxemburg in which the dancers move one step forward,
then two steps back. As this example suggests, whatever remains truly
progressive in the idea of progress is always open to radical
qualification for Adorno, whose reputation for cultural pessimism is
well-deserved. Yet it is also true that this dimension of his thought sets
the stage, dialectically speaking, for the simultaneous unfolding of a
politics and theory of hope (or rather “hope against hope”). From this
perspective real progress would involve humanity coming to know
itself and its actual circumstances. In his lectures of 1964-65 titled
“History and Freedom” Adorno makes the following paradoxical
observation: “progress means escaping from the magic spell, including
the spell of progress that is itself nature. This happens when human
beings become conscious of their own naturalness and call a halt to their
own domination of nature, a domination by means of which nature’s
own domination is perpetuated. In this sense, we might say that
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progress occurs when it comes to an end.”

It is precisely in relation to this constitutive aporia of progress that

Adorno’s theoretical project and Loos’s cultural criticism present as
many differences as affinities. Adorno once trenchantly observed that
from the slingshot to the atom bomb there is progress but that no
corresponding progress in the moral sphere could offset the
unspeakable horror perpetrated by technical advance pursued for its
own sake. Yet for Loos, whose journal Das Andere carried the subtitle A
Journal for the Introduction of Western Culture into Austria, the theme of
progress was highly actual, if always presented in an ironic light that
accentuates it cultural relativity. At the same time Loos was hardly
indifferent to the benefits of technological progress, as is clear from his
enthusiasm for English plumbing and his staunch Americanism. In part
the difference between their respective stances, which is both very real
and in some ways quite subtle, is due to the fact that Loos belonged to
the preceding generation (Loos was born in 1870, Adorno in 1901).
Adorno lived through World War II, while Loos did not: Loos died in
1933, the year Hitler came to power. “Progress” had a bitter ring for
Adorno, who surveyed the ruins of global war and its unspeakable
aftermath: he famously observed that poetry is impossible after
Auschwitz. The points of tangency between their views of progress are
thus colored by a considerable divergence of experience, which only
makes Adorno’s return to Loos towards the end of his life all the more
intriguing.

Like many of his contemporaries, Loos moves from the assumption that
the trajectory of modern culture follows an evolutionary path
privileging progress on the technological front as well as within the
sphere of everyday life, its utilitarian objects, codes of dress, and
techniques of the body. In this sense, technological progress in
particular and its more broadly understood (albeit partly questionable)
corollary of “cultural progress” in general are closely linked. Yet, unlike
many of his contemporaries, Loos did not grasp any form of progress
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from a unilinear perspective. Modernity, from this standpoint, “is

synonymous with the actuality of tradition. This actuality, however, is
very specific, because one can no longer talk of an uninterrupted
continuity in tradition. Economic developments and progress have led
to a rupture in the organic relationship that existed between individuals
and their culture.” For Loos, forward and backward were not mutually
exclusive alternatives: in his view multiple cultural levels and
temporalities can coexist or collide in a single historical moment, often
with incongruous consequences. As a result, past and present
interpenetrate in his work. Spatially this fusion of opposites found its
most characteristic expression in the Raumplan and in the allied contrast,
in reality a dialectical continuity, between the stripped exteriors of
Loos’s houses and the layered complexity and luxurious cladding of
their interiors.

Ornament and the Rhythms of History

From this nuanced temporal and spatial perspective ornament is

permissible in the countryside while being anathema in the city. It is
one measure of the complexity of Loos’ position that he did not reject
ornament per se, as many critics and historians have erroneously
assumed. Like other perceptive intellectuals of the finis Austriae--here
one is reminded of the carefully choreographed alternation between
urban and rural forms of life in Musil’s Man Without Qualities, or the
stark contrast between lilting folk melodies and the harsh sounds
associated with the modern city and industrialization in Mahler’s
symphonies and tone poems--Loos noted that time moved more slowly
in the provinces than in the Imperial capital.

Loos argued that ornament, as a privileged repository of

the formal and erotic impulses of bygone eras, should not be totally
repudiated. Here it is not so much a question of seeing Loos as that most
paradoxical of men, the “radical conservative” or intellectual split-
personality, but of recognizing something more historically attuned in
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his critical attitude: an insight into the internal contradictions of Austro-

Hungarian culture. In this regard Loos did not only understand that
ornament is subject to variable historical rhythms, but also maintained
that to fall out of step with these rhythms can have a deleterious effect.
Given the rootlessness of the inhabitant of the modern metropolis, in
Loos’ view it would be intellectually dishonest as well as economically
wasteful to pursue a program of ornamentation in the city. This, among
other reasons, is why Loos’s critique hit its mark: in the twentieth-
century Grosstadt technical efficiency, the social consequences of
industrialization and the functional optimization effected by the
removal of ornament reflect a conception of culture that is more modern
than the prevalent one in Austria at the time, in which the self-conscious
artiness of the Sezession and Wiener Werkstatte was the dominant feature.

Along with Alois Riegl (Stilfragen, 1893) and other protagonists of the
Vienna School of art history, Loos was among the first to recognize that
the differentiated temporality of ornament complements its ordering
of space and its rhythmic articulation of architectural form. This
temporality is at once experiential and historical. It is no accident that
Loos compared a jaunt in the Austrian countryside to a journey back in
time to the great ethnic displacements that marked the end of the
Roman Empire, which may be an implicit citation of another book of
Riegl’s, Spätrömisches Kunstindustrie (1901), published seven years
before Ornament and Crime. Yet this aperçu, whose wit is only matched
by its profundity, is also inscribed in the same general context as the
ironic citations of Darwin and Haeckel that Loos used to associate the
newborn’s sensorium first with that of a puppy, then with that of an
ape, and finally with that of a budding Voltaire who presumably is more
culturally advanced than the protagonists of the Sezession. Pursuing the
same transhistorical logic from a different angle, Loos elaborated an
accelerated, and as it were, streamlined vision of classical tradition that
makes it look strikingly modern. A similar approach is evident in his
entry for the Chicago Tribune Tower competition, in which Louis
Sullivan’s comparison of the modern skyscraper and the classical
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column achieves an ironic apotheosis, and in his quip that if the ancient
Greeks had bicycles, they would have looked like ours, unencumbered
by any surfeit of ornament.

In Ornament and Crime Loos offers a polemical account of ornament that

is buttressed by a succint history of what Norbert Elias has called the
civilizing process. This is evident above all from such lapidary
statements as “the evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal
of ornament from objects of daily use” but also from the extension of the
argument to architecture and clothing. The thematic, “ornament and its
vicissitudes’’, once illuminated in its historical complexities through the
merciless application of the blade of critique, revealed itself to be, at a
deeper level, the history of man’s attempt to free himself of phobias and
anxieties, leaving him ready, if not always willing, to confront the
unadorned void. This void was modern architecture in its most
fundamental condition. Ornament’s history is, according to Loos,
basically the history of its removal: a normative, as well as empirical
history, highly significant for the unfolding of modernity. What remains
of ornament is atavistic, the sign of a retrograde condition in the city
and of an earlier era in the country. In this last context it deserves all due
respect: yet it has no place in the modern metropolis, which for Loos
could be classical, to be sure, but without external decoration, either as
singular detail or more integral component of a formal language.

Ornament vs. Function

Yet what precisely, in Adorno’s view, connects the removal of ornament

from architecture and objects of daily use to the modern ideal of
functional optimization? And how does his attitude towards ornament
relate to Loos’s position in Ornament and Crime? To answer these
questions it is necessary to analyze the argument put forward in
“Functionalism Today” before turning to the reading of Loos that
appears in the Aesthetic Theory.
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Loos makes his first appearance in the essay hard on the heels of an
anecdote about the perceived superfluousness of ornament in music.
This is illustrated by Mozart’s response to a philistine member of the
Austrian royal family who had complained that there were too many
notes in the overture to the Abduction from the Seraglio. “Not one that
is not necessary” was the composer’s prompt reply. With architecture
things are not all that different. It would be just as philistine to condemn
Baroque architecture (and art) for its ornamental excess as it would be to
criticize Mozart’s overture for its potent flourishes, which, far from
being extraneous, were part of the immanent logic of the composition.
Adorno points out that this is due to a fact that Loos understood better
than anybody: that criticism of ornament means no more than criticism
of that which has lost its functional and symbolic significance.

In this respect ornament is imbued with a historicity that cannot be

gainsaid. On the one hand, “the difference between the necessary and
the superfluous is inherent in a work, and is not defined by the works’s
relationship—or the lack of it—to anything external to itself.” On the
other hand, the criteria governing this difference undergo numerous
modifications in accordance with the stylistic shifts and continuities that
shape the history of art. In fact, a double historicity informs the
argument put forward by Adorno at this point, as a consequence of the
way he reframes Loos’s insights by assigning them to the early period of
functionalism. He associates this period with Peter Altenberg in
literature, most probably because of the minimalist drive to aphoristic
concentration of this author, and with Le Corbusier in architecture, who
famously championed Loos’s “Homeric cleansing” of the discipline.
Adorno situates historically between these two figures, and this gives
his discourse a specific critical role and function that allows it to move
beyond Ruskin and William Morris, critics whose insights he clearly
drew upon.

A significant turning point in Adorno’s analysis of the relationship of

ornament and function can be seen in the historical transformation of
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ornament that took place in the period from Ruskin to Loos. This period
is pivotal for the emergence of a modern aesthetic insofar as it was then
that a revolt occurred, already found in Semper’s critique of the Great
Exhibition in London of 1851, attacking mass-produced articles of use.
All of these items were“pseudo-individualized”, as Adorno puts it,
referring to the universe of kitsch objects as a parody, conscious or not,
of the universe of genuinely individualized craft objects it supplanted.
Yet as Adorno points out, even Loos noted the inadequacy on the purely
aesthetic level of any return to craft inspired by such vague conceptions
as Kunstwollen, will to form, Gestaltung or Stilisierung propounded in
such diverse cultural arenas as the Vienna School of Art History, the
Werkbund, and the Arts and Crafts Movement.

While agreeing in a general way with Loos’s critique of mass

production, Adorno singles out a specific argument that develops one of
Loos’s most profound insights into the modern dialectic of ornament
and function. Loos realized that utilitarian objects lose their meaning
once they are disengaged from contexts in which their adherence to
established functional codes was obligatory. In other words, the point at
which useful objects are no longer useful is when their historically
conditioned function expires. At this point they are no longer beautiful
either. In this respect the super-added, and therefore highly artificial art
of practical objects becomes a source of the pervasive ugliness of mass-
produced objects. The ugliness in question is only compounded by the
fact that even the practical reorientation of the originally functionless art
of the same era is driven into the clutches of the profit-motive. Contrary
to this tendency, and endorsing a course of action that was at least
partly inspired by Ruskin, Loos called for a renewal of genuine craft
production. This renewal would be integrated within the universe of
modern technical development without having to borrow stylized forms
—in a word, obsolete forms of ornament--from art.

Aesthetic Identity, Abstraction, and Mimesis

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It is with reference to the opposition of ornament and function that

Adorno’s account of the historical logic of ornament in “Functionalism
Today” intersects the theory of ornament put forward in the Aesthetic
Theory. In both texts, there is a recognition that the moment one
succumbs to the restorative ideal, one falls—even in a mind as vigilant
and critical as Loos’s—into a nostalgia for the superior aesthetic quality
of the ostensibly nonaestheticized, purely functional object. In this sense
the claims that Loos advanced for a functional aesthetic suffered,
according to Adorno, from too simple an antithesis.

Indeed, when dealing with these claims a wider problematic is involved

which falls under the rubric of what Adorno called “the obsolescence
of traditional aesthetics.” In his view, it is owing to the radical
transformation of aesthetic categories that is a hallmark of modernity--a
general shift that affected not only the traditional dichotomy of
ornament vs. function but also the allied oppositions of form vs. content,
beauty vs. ugliness and completeness vs. fragmentation--that an
unprecedented conception of aesthetic construction arose that makes
Loos’ opposition between functional and ornamental seem undialectical.

This conception presupposes the assertion of a critical role for art in

modern society. The argument Adorno puts forward for this role--one of
the principal themes of the Aesthetic Theory-- is based on the inner
dialectic of social reality and aesthetic identity. The latter refers to the
integrity of the modern art work, which Adorno contrasts to subjective
identity. For Adorno a fake identity is foisted onto the subject
everywhere in the modern world; the modern work of art in its identity
and integrity offers critical resistance to this process of ideological
conformism and cultural homogenization. As he puts it “aesthetic
identity is different [from false subjective identity] in one important
respect: it is meant to assist the non-identical in its struggle against the
repressive identification compulsion that rules the outside world.”.
Aesthetic identity is moreover intimately bound up with what Adorno
calls the inherent functionality of art, which is synonymous with its
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social function. This idea of function dialectically appropriates the

conformist principle of sese conservare, i.e., the drive to self-preservation,
and turns this principle against the fetishization of identity that
pervades modern society.

Abstraction enters the argument both as corollary and as consequence of

the thesis of aesthetic identity, which is not “identitarian” but rather
corrodes the fake identity of subjects in its refusal of mimesis. Yet far
from implying any direct equivalence between artistic mimesis and
subjective identity, Adorno argues for modern art’s capacity to offer a
critical model of non-identity in its embrace of abstract negativity. In his
view, the latter provides a cultural precondition for alternate readings of
the subject to emerge. In this sense, too, the paradox that “art’s function
is to have no function” joins forces with its apparent, though not actual,
counterthesis, that art’s most significant function in the modern world is
critical. Art, from this perspective, becomes society’s social antithesis.

From this perspective ornament has a double role. Impeding the

modernist impulse to reduce architecture to its essentials, it can be seen
as an obstacle to the optimization of function-as-program. On the other
hand, in specific contexts of modern art (literary, musical, as well as
visual) such as the highly stylized language of Joyce’s Ulysses, ornament
has a critical purpose, and in this respect, an anti-ideological function.
Clearly the concept of function (which always has something of a
sociological overtone for Adorno) assumes different valences when he is
dealing with art and culture in general as opposed to architecture in
particular. One can say, then, that Adorno only partly accepts Loos’
critique of ornament as impediment to function. Since for Adorno art is
both a social fact (in Durkheim’s sense) and a relatively autonomous
entity, art’s non-mimetic, abstract dimension--the one that would seem
to be most clearly opposed to the ornamental impulse--stands the best
chance of enabling the work to break free from the tyranny of the real.
Needless to say, the mimetic capacity becomes even more evident in
those situations when primitive forms of ornament such as tattoing and
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graffiti are stressed at the expense of the more sublimated and abstract
forms typical of the Jugendstil and Sezession. Loos’s failure to distinguish
adequately between abstract and mimetic forms of ornament is one of
the reasons why Adorno saw him as falling short when discussing the
complex relationship between the transgression of social and legal
norms that falls under the category of “crime” and the atavistic return to
ornament.

Adorno observed in this regard: “He [Loos] seems to see in ornament

the mimetic impulse, which runs contrary to rational objectification; he
sees in it an expression which, even in sadness and lament, is related to
the pleasure principle. Arguing from this principle, one must accept that
there is a factor of expression in every object.” In this way Adorno,
though appreciative of the assault on all forms of kitsch, especially of
the Viennese variety, inherent in Loos’ anti-ornament polemic, discerns
a puritanical tendency at work in its broad sphere of application.

At the same time it is worth focussing on the wider implications of

Loos’s emphasis on the mimetic aspect of ornament. In this respect
ornament offers incriminating evidence of cultural regression. Adorno
thinks that in assigning it this role, Loos goes too far. Indeed one may
well ask why Loos projected something as seemingly innocuous as
ornament onto something so apparently remote from ornament as
criminal activity.

One plausible answer lies in Loos’s specific critical purpose: to reveal the
underlying assumptions of ornament as a universal cultural
phenomenon, modulated in its various manifestations according to
diverse historical circumstances. At the same time, for Loos, it is
necessary to recognize that the domains of ornament and crime are not
totally distinct. He seems to have realized that the strange sensation of
horror vacui is, in the case of ornament, that which abhors ambivalence.
One might even say that the power of ornament is caught up at some
level with the attempt to ward off danger, and therefore constitutes a
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kind of apotropaic activity. Ornament and crime would thus be linked

for Loos not only by the pleasure principle, as Adorno asserts, but by an
archaic fear of the unknown.

Loos was aware of this aspect of ornament in connection with the idea of
the mask and its inherent relation to cladding, even if it gets somewhat
obscured by his interest in the erotic associations of ornamenting the
body as well as the surfaces of the world in general. Adorno observed,
in what is probably his most incisive critique of Loos’ position, that
“that art aspires to autonomy does not mean that it unconditionally
purges itself of ornamental elements: the very existence of art, judged by
the criteria of the practical, is ornamental.” Apotropaic, magical,
practices, as strange as this may seem to “modern” ears, were in fact
eminently practical in many so-called primitive societies: in this regard
what Loos condemns as impractical excess actually had, at the “origins”
of ornamental formalization, a specific purpose, which Adorno calls
“psychological” in that they fused symbolic, mimetic/expressive, as well
as specifically utilitarian purposes.

Art, in fact, is the heir of such cultic practices. In light of this observation
Adorno’s critique acquires a new significance which is summed up in an
insight that stands at its heart: “If Loos’ critique of ornament had been
rigidly consistent, he would have had to extend it to all of art. To his
credit, he stopped before reaching that conclusion.” Adorno pointed this
out in full awareness of the historicity of the ornament/crime analogy
put forward by Loos while being equally conscious of the link between
transgression and modern art that was obvious to anyone who lived
through the turbulent historical period he had experienced first-hand.

Architectural Ornament and the Aesthetic Moment of Schein

Yet for Adorno, it is not so much the ornament/crime nexus which is at

stake but rather the art/society nexus, the mediating term being the
effect of ideological delusion. In this regard, at least in one of its
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moments, art wards off delusion, taking the form of critique, or

assimilating it. This is the case even if a crucial aspect of modern art is to
bring about, through Schein, the mobilization of appearances. Art
contains within itself a tendency, reactionary in the extreme, to further
the effects of mass deception by promoting the spread of the ideological
principle as such. Yet it also contains a countertendency that seeks to
expose the deception. The modern aesthetic field per se is thus a
battleground between critique and ideology for Adorno: and as with
every battleground, the outcome of what occurs on it can never be taken
for granted. In his view, as in Loos’, one of the chief vehicles of
regressive ideology is precisely the drive to cover surfaces with
superfluous decoration.

On the other hand, certain aspects of the modern art work—as already
mentioned, the overt stylization of language in Joyce’s Ulysses--disclose
an inner affinity with ornament, since the idea of a work in progress, or
of a perpetually incomplete form of artistic action, has a deep point of
contact with apparently anachronistic decorative impulses. Ornament,
in this respect, cannot be invented, as Loos once remarked. Adorno
thought that the remark should be generalized, since if ornament has no
beginning, it implies a model of artistic production that has no end
either. This model operates in accordance with a logic of formal
continuity manifest above all in its original cultural contexts. In these
contexts, ornament arises organically from its social matrix, and is not
authored by a single artist but contains a collective dimension intimately
within its structure.

At specific historical moments of art, as for instance in certain tendencies

of Baroque art which Adorno calls decorazione assoluta, the modern
critique of ornament, by which is almost certainly meant Loos though
Loos is not named, is at once “anticipated and undercut” since the
function of this pure excess, of this tendency to absolute formalization,
is theatrical in nature, and hence in a certain way follows a social
functionality its own. Here it is perhaps relevant to recall that Loos
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admired certain Baroque architects, especially Johann Fischer von

Erlach: another instance of the multifaceted aesthetic sensibility of Loos,
whose critique of ornament should not be read as repudiating ornament
per se, but simply specific abuses of it, that Adorno seems to have taken
further than Loos himself. On the other hard, it is interesting to note that
Adorno, in his late essay of 1963 on the linkages between the musical,
artistic and architectural avant-gardes in Vienna, underscored the link
between the Loos’ aesthetic views and “ascetic elements” of the earlier
Viennese Baroque, which he correctly pointed out, have yet to be fully
investigated.

Architecture, the only art form that is intrinsically connected with that
which is not art, i.e., function in the sense of “program”, occupies a
special position in Adorno’s dialectical reading of the collective
dimension of art and its theoretical corollary, a partial or relative
autonomy. Here artistic function and architectural function must be
carefully distinguished: for as we recall, the function of art for Adorno is
both social and critical, to break with regressive identity in the subject,
whereas in the sphere of architecture function desigantes simply the
non-formal, programmatic aspect as such. Architectural function and
ornament are therefore antithetical—but so are architectural function
and form (even if the “aesthetic identity” of art which is key to its social
function is in its way equivalent to form). Just as the relationship
between ornament and crime, for Loos, is one of historical
complementarity rather than of strict identification, so too the
relationship between functionalism and the social determination of
architectural form, for Adorno, is partial rather than total. The aspect of
form which effectively escapes such determination, even as it registers it
visually on the surface, is the Schein of decorative schemes, the
ornamental pattern itself.

It remains an open question as to whether architectural stylization--i.e.

the Schein embodied in ornament-- could have a critical effect, though
this would seem to be a dubious proposition given Adorno’s rejection of
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the restorative aspect of Loos’ emphasis on handicraft. Since Adorno

never discusses Loos’s architecture, this hypothetical extension of a
critical role for ornament cannot be verified by this sector of Loos’
output: yet from what we know of Adorno’s critique of certain forms of
modernist domestic architecture in Minima Moralia—where he
condemns, on the one hand, “living cases manufactured for philistines
by experts,” and on the other “factory sites that have strayed into the
consumption sphere”, it seems plausible to suggest that Loos as
architect might have been spared the Adornian critical scalpel—or he
might not have.

In any case Adorno paid very little attention to the interior of Loos’s
villas. Significantly, he observes that Loos’s criticism, but not his
architecture, “like so much bourgeois critique of culture,” is
characterized by an “intersection of two fundamental directions.” On
the one hand, Loos realized “that this culture is not all that cultural.” On
the other, “he felt a deep animosity towards culture in general, which
called for the prohibition of any superficial veneer, but also of soft and
smooth touches. In this he disregarded the fact that culture is not the
place for untamed nature, nor for a merciless domination over nature. It
could not longer inflict on men—whom it supposedly upheld as the
only measure-- the sadistic blows of sharp edges, bare calculated rooms,
stairways, and the like.” Here Adorno seems to lump together Loos’
anti-ornament critique and subsequent functionalist dogma. If anyone is
disgegarding anything here, it is Adorno who fails to mention the often
sumptuous interiors of the Raumplan, which can in fact be quite soft to
the touch (especially in the bedroom areas), and the welcoming,
sheltering complexity of the inserted stairs, which serve as eloquent
counterparts to the inglenooks in Loosian domestic space. At most one
can say Adorno may have judged (or misjudged) Loos’s architecture, if
he looked at it all, from outward appearances, ie. in terms of the austere
treatment of the exteriors.

Although Adorno never explicitly says so, it would seem that he takes
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it for granted that architecture’s Schein offers a partial equivalent to

ornament. Remove the ornament and a return to pure architectural
function is, on the face of it, not only possible but necessary: and this
would seem to be the most effective explanation that one can find for the
anticipation of a redeemed social world that the best modern
architecture, even the most dogmatically functionalist, contains within
itself as a critical potential. The removal of ornament is thus a distinctly
redemptive act, but it is certainly not enough. It too is tainted by the
ambivalence of a cultural lag, or better, a fundamental disparity between
the image of a utopian Versohnung or reconciled world emanating from
much of the greatest works of modern architecture, Loos’s included, and
the actual sorry state of affairs which goes by the name of modern
society. Yet the riven character of Loos’s architecture also tacitly
registers the crisis of a culture that is divided from itself, an inner
heterogeneity which , as already seen, Adorno overlooked.

“Architecture Worthy of Human Beings”

For Adorno, it is likely that modern art will continue to unfold as long as
the world is broken and irreconcilable: it would seem, indeed, to have
quite a long lease on life under these circumstances. Philosophy, too,
lives on since the chance to realize it was missed. And since modern art
is often not only imageless in its abstraction, even when it comes closest
to conceptual elaboration it is still quite far from being assimilated into
the philosophical domain as this is traditionally conceived. Similarly,
where some of the greatest art in the modern era is marked by non-
conceptual abstraction, which acts as a reminder of the misplaced
concreteness of contemporary social relations, at the same historical
juncture modern architecture is condemned to await, even as it
prefigures, a more ethical humanity which does not yet exist. Or, as
Adorno puts it in an unforgettable phrase that captures much of the
pathos of modern architecture in general and of Loos’s contribution in
particular: “Architecture worthy of human beings thinks better of men
than they actually are.”
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The pathos of this thought is linked to a specific tension within modern

culture. To be more precise, Adorno, citing the historical dynamic of
functionalization inaugurated by Loos’s attack on ornament, argued that
the fact that such diverse protagonists of modern architecture as Le
Corbusier and Scharoun were unable to build more of their radical ideas
stems from an antagonism inherent in modern architecture. This is “a
social antagonism over which the greatest architecture has no power: the
same society which developed human productive energes to
unimaginable proportions has chained them to conditions of production
imposed upon them: thus the people in in reality constitute the
productive energies become deformed according to the measure of their
working conditions. This fundamental contradiction is most clearly
visible in architecture. It is just as difficult for architecture to rid itself of
the tensions from which this contradiction proceeds as it for the
consumer.”

Adorno purues this line of argument further by adding that “things are
not universally correct in architecture and universally incorrect in men.
Men suffer enough injustice, for their consciousness and
unconsciousness are trapped in a state of minority: they have not, so to
speak, come of age. This nonage hinders their identification with their
own concerns. Because architecture is in fact both autonomous and
purpose-oriented it cannot simply negate men as they are. And yet it
must do precisely that it if it is to remain autonomous ….” The idea that
an architecture worthy of humanity exists, and in so doing prefigures
that very humanity whose horizon it evokes but cannot realize, lends
Adorno’s reading its theoretical specificity. It enables it to match, and in
some cases to supersede, many of Loos’ most penetrating observations
on ornament. One might even say that Loos helped Adorno reach a
critical point situated beyond the intellectual coordinates of Loos’s
polemic both in theoretical and historical terms.

Adorno, Loos, and Viennese Modernism

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As is the case with seminal texts, Loos’s critique of ornament stands at

the intersection of a great number of readings, both potential and actual.
Adorno’s is among the most significant, despite its total disgregard of
the impact of Loos’ theory on his practice. To clarify the implications of
this reception one must take into account the incidence of stronger and
weaker readings able to bring out latent potentials within a corpus of
thought or a given conceptual ensemble. When it came into contact with
Adorno’s relentless critical gaze, Loos’ critique of ornament disclosed
unexpected theoretical dimensions, clarifying areas of implication and
cultural forms that Loos himself never had the opportunity of
inclination to explore.

To be more specific, Adorno, taking Loos as a point of reference, moved

in the direction of an austere aesthetic that was disposed to shun
ornament from the outset, preferring Schoenberg to Stravinsky, to
invoke the musical/architectural analogies of which Adorno was so
fond. Here it is relevant to recall that Adorno probably first heard of
Loos in Vienna in 1924, when he began studying composition with
Schoenberg’s disciple Alban Berg). At the same time, he began to
regularly attend the lectures of Karl Kraus, accompanied by Berg
himself—an intellectual experience which the young Adorno never
forgot and which had a profound impact on his development . It is no
exaggeration to say, then, that a significant moment of Adorno’s
intellectual formation occurred in the climate of the “apolitical yet
culturally radical Vienna of Karl Kraus and the Schoenberg circle”—the
same circle in which Loos himself actively participated.

This reading casts a prospective light on the late Adorno’s reception of

Loos, which from this perspective constitutes something of a return to
an earlier cultural matrix. In this connection it is pertinent to recall an
observation that Adorno made near the end of his life, which shows that
Loos, Schoenberg and Kraus all contributed to the enunciation
of a shared critique of ornament with a specific critical function in the
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universe of European modernity: “…Schoenberg, Karl Kraus and Adolf

Loos were of one mind. They were the enemies of the ornamental, the
comfortable enjoyment of an art that committed you to nothing, that
rlied all too complacently on its own stability while lapsing inexorably
into the merely sybaritic. Their polemics were directed at hacks in every
realm, not just in journalism, against everyone who offered his own
individuality, which was the same as every other, for sale in the
marketplace. That complacent conciliatoriness of the Viennese softened
the brutal demands of material production and hence created a space in
which the intellect could move and thrive. But it also infected it.. This is
why true intellect had to rebel and defend itself against the
circumstances that had given birth to it.”

It is also highly likely that Siegfried Kracauer’s Mass Ornament, which

appeared in 1927, though it makes no mention of Loos, and develops a
theory of ornament that is wholly independent of, and in some ways
antithetical to, Loos’s own, directed the young Adorno towards readings
of modern culture refracted through the lens of a critique of ornament.
Yet, whatever its formative factors, one thing is certain: in its ability to
bring together diverse realms of cultural expression like music and
architecture and to draw cogent theoretical insights from this
comprehensive approach, Adorno’s reception of Loos equals in depth
and incisiveness Loos’ own confrontation with an architectural culture
in the grips of a particularly severe form of decorative corruption
affecting all realms of design, clothing and the Lebenswelt.

Ornament and its Discontents: Loos and Adornian Kulturkritik

Given this complex situation, it is worth emphasizing that Loos

was not simply grist for Adorno’s dialectical mill. Instead, Loos
expanded the scope of Adorno’s aesthetic theory by framing the
problem of modern architecture in a very specific way. The reference to
Loos was decisive in that it gave Adornian Kulturkritik a new set of
intellectual possibilities underscoring the historicity of ornament by
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highlighting its internal tension with function. Yet unlike Loos Adorno
considered this last concept under diverse theoretical aspects, shifting
the center of gravity of the theoretical consideration of ornament away
from what he saw as traces of puritan moralism in Loos’ denunciation of
decorative excess. Despite--or perhaps precisely because of--the fact that
Loos did not construct a systematic aesthetics, but devised a series of
aphoristic variations on the theme of the deleterious effects of misplaced
ornament, Adorno, in the context of his dialectical aesthetics, felt
justified in calling on him as a star witness in the trial against the
decorative excesses committed not only in art and architecture, but in
the field of language as well. By the same token, Adorno explicitly
rejects any kind of dogmatic functionalism. And though they do not
agree on every point, Adorno’s account of the historical and aesthetic
implications of ornament could not have arisen, or at least would not
have taken the form that it did, without his theoretical assimilation of
Loos’s nuanced polemic against the fin-de-siecle “culture of ornament”.
This was a critique which, as Adorno was acutely aware, played a
decisive role in the emergence of modern architecture.

Yet Loos had a proleptic as well as a historical significance for Adorno.

This is the case insofar as modern architecture, traversed by a highly
differentiated set of utopian and/or reformist impulses, delineates, for
Adorno, along with many other modernists who staked their theory and
practice on the future, a society worthy of the architecture that
prefigures it. In this respect Adorno’s reading of Loos joins forces with a
theoretical “parallel action” linking his inquiry back to one of the main
sources of Benjamin’s Rettende Kritik: the confrontation with Karl Kraus,
who incessantly probed the flaws of the present in the hope that they
would disappear in such a way that the negative contours they left
behind would set the stage for the society to come. From the redemptive
point of view offered by this confrontation, the respective “messages” of
Kraus, Loos, Benjamin and Adorno form a unique constellation.
Although this constellation cannot be said to align their different critical
standpoints with an aesthetic purged entirely of ornament, it does
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indicate a historical horizon in which such an outcome is conceivable,

without compromising the specificity of their contributions to the
modern debate on the relationship between architecture and culture.
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