Kevin Ting-yu Huang 2010551382 ARCH2003: 20th Century Architecture I Final Assignment

What is Style? Continuing his harsh tone from his previous article Ornament and Crime, Adolf Loos once again critiques the architects of his time in his essay Architecture. In Architecture he rejects ornamentation again and speaks of his contemporary architectural standards condescendingly. Simply put, Loos argues that architects should stop searching for style in the pieces of the past; rather, architects should accept that there is indeed a style of their own time one that lacks ornamentation and celebrates unadorned plainness. He starts off his article by giving his vision of beauty. The mountains, lakes, houses, and farms that come from Gods workshop embody the real definition of beauty in our world. A villa that abruptly cuts through the scene just destroys the beauty, no matter how good that villa is made. Loos explains. The farmers, masons, carpenters, joiners, and other craftsmen all follow their traditions and do their jobs as their cultures instructs them to. Architects (excluding Loos himself, of course) have no culture. The false prophets go around advocating their own version of beauty, which is made up of different collages of ornamentation from the past civilizations and times. As Loos had made clear in Ornament in

Crime, the craftsmen of his day are not capable of inventing new ornamentation. The craftsman follows his culture, just as all the craftsmen of the past did. Our culture has reached to a state of ornamentation. We have finally got rid of the monstrosities, but the schools and intellectuals are still teaching their students towards ornamentation. They are forcing the craftsmen to go against their culture and to add superfluous ornamentations to their works. Those enemies that Loos is so disgusted of think that ornamentation is exactly style. They think that the past is just filled with ornamentation, and thus they feel the need to continue the usage of ornamentation. In Loos mind, they are outrageously wrong, for the people of the past were not blind advocators of ornamentation. Objects with ornamentation were passed down to this day merely because they were more useless and thus did not wear out. What infuriates Loos even more is that, those hated schools do not just promote ornamentation; they even make the fluent hand of draftsmanship the highest goal of architects. Architects can design bad buildings, but if they draw really nice and detailed two-dimensional drawings, they will be deemed by the society as good architects. Loos defends his own work with this argument. Real value in architecture is not determined by draftsmanship. Loos even proudly says that his own works are nothing when represented in two dimensions. A lot of people do not accept his work, to the extent of calling his Caf Museum Caf Anarchism, but Loos reveals that many years later, only his building stands. All the buildings of the other architects had been discarded. As such, Loos maintains

that only the buildings themselves influence people, not the fancy drawings or ornamentations. If ornamentation does not fit with the modern times, then what is indeed the style of the 1900? Loos attempted to answer this in the latter part of his essay. The pure form of the 20th century style is manifested through the unimpeded work the craftsmen. Beauty lies within the pure form of the materials, in the space, in the interactions of the solid and the void. Loos subsequently makes a comparison of architecture to clothing. Both change with the culture of the society, but the warped graduates of the schools had not taken the trouble to reform clothing, for they thought it was too insignificant of an object to spend time over. They would rather spent hours and hours inventing a new elaborately detailed ornament. According to Loos, the style of 1900 only differs from the style of 1800 to the same extent as the tail coat of 1900 differs from that of 1800. By not very much, that is. Clothing, like architecture, got simpler as culture evolved, and the blue cloth and gold buttons of the 1800s changed to the black cloth and black buttons of the 1900s. The clothing of the modern time had to be the one that was the most inconspicuous. Yet, in fact this very inconspicuousness leads to much attention in both clothing and architecture. When everybody is wearing the fancy decorated clothes of the past or the imaginary future, a person in just a plain coat walks by. Everybody would certainly be shocked and offended. Loos says the same happens to his architecture, which break the status quo of his time.

The final part of Loos essay makes a comment on art and architecture. Is architecture an art? Society obviously deems architecture as an art, with architects going to the limits of the creativity to make new ornaments to put all over their buildings. Yet Loos says that over the course of history, it is quite evident that architecture evolves with the culture of the time. That is why clothing and architecture are able to stay consistent over so many years, although they are two completely different things. A building is different from a painting, however. A building has to be practical and please the whole society. Those who do not like a piece of art can choose not to look at it. Those who do not like a piece of music can choose not to listen to it. Yet everybody is forced to look at architecture whether they like it or not. Thus, Loos says that other than monuments, all of architecture should not be thought of as art. Then what is architecture? Architecture is the form that comes from tradition and culture. Or so is the definition suggested by Loos in his essay. It is interesting to put this definition of architecture in the context of today. When Loos wrote his essay in around 1910, he thought of his own time as modern. Yet we are now standing a century after Loos essay was published, we should have even gone further than Loos and his comtemporaries. The architects of Le Corbusiers time seem to have gone beyond the ornament, creating what we now call Modernist architecture. The focus on simple geometry and pure form has indeed led to a style that is recognizable even today. Yet is there a style manifest today? Do

Loos words ring true, such that every single culture should have its specific style? The matter seems highly debatable. One can look at the works of Zaha Hadid and Tadao Ando and see stark contrast among her Guangzhou Opera House and his Church of the Light. And Frank Gehrys Guggenheim Museum also looks completely different to Rem Koolhaas CCTV Tower. It seems perhaps that the message Loos so desperately wanted to get through to his contemporaries has been lost after decades of change. The path of culture leads away from ornamentation to unadorned plainness. Indeed, in our time we are no longer designing any more Greek orders or Gothic arches or whatnot. It seems clear that architects are in search for the best form. Perhaps we have taken the unadorned plainness Loos was so fascinated with to a whole new level. The sophisticated architects among us have certainly learned to appreciate the beauty of bare stone. This is evident through the examples of the Church of the Light of Daniel Libeskinds Jewish Museum. They use very pure forms of material, and they use cuts through the material to manipulate light in an expert fashion. Yet one problem is that we cannot seem to fit the architecture of our day into one single style. Every architect of our time has his or her own style. Frank Gehry has his crazy shapes. Zaha Hadid has her insane perspective forms. Herzog and de Meuron love working on elaborate building skins. Norman Foster creates high-tech mathematical forms. Culture does not seem to be the driver for forms in todays case. Todays architecture seems to be of some mixed international type. Students of architecture travel to institutional mediums of mixed nationalities to study their

future occupations, contrary to those of Loos time. In the 1900s, students of one country probably only studied at the school in their region, and thus their architecture remained very cultural. Yet today, people from Japanese to American attend schools such as the Architectural Association, Cooper Union, and even the University of Hong Kong. Subsequently, it is also intriguing to see how the architectural schools of today differ from those that Loos talked about in his essay. Loos deemed all those schools and their warped graduates as the enemy of their culture, advocating for the usage of ornaments in all buildings. They are excessively obsessed with draftsmenship, and they made draftsmenship the basis for judging architectural excellence. In todays architectural schools, draftsmenship seems to have become less of an issue. At least in the University of Hong Kong it is so. After studying for a year and a half at the Faculty of Architecture here, it seems that most of the professors push for the ideas behind the drawings rather than the details or the delicacy of the drawings themselves. However, it seems that they push for something as well, along with the instructors of many other architectural institutions. They are obsessed with exhibitions. They think that exhibitions are judging factors of architectural excellence. They instruct their students in their projects, but they tend to lean towards presentability. They make the students projects so presentable that at final crit would turn up like another exhibition itself. And they invite a bunch of guest jurors to impress them with their extraordinary exhibition. They want the students to make the drawings as abstract and crazy as possible. Unfortunately, the

drawings just turn out to be infinitely obscure and not practical at all. Loos himself said that the drawings are a means of communicating the architects thoughts to the craftsmen (or engineers in our modern sense.) The kinds of drawings that some schools teach now do not serve this practical purpose at all. Doubtless, when the students enter the real field of architecture, they would not have the freedom or the possibility to draw those unrealistic drawings that in fact relay no useful information. This may be the direct result of many school professors themselves having too less experience in realizing building designs. Thus, if Loos argument is indeed sound, then the schools of today are also enemies of our culture. They are also promoting the graphic art that Loos hated with such fervor. Ornamentation may have died, but a new crime has risen. A century after Loos time, most architects may not even agree that architecture is not one of the arts. Each architect has his own distinct style today, and there does not seem to be one real international style that culture dictates over the architects. Perhaps Loos is wrong and style has only gone out of fashion. An architects role now is still to create buildings that can please everyone but also to explore the boundaries of his or her creativity. At least this is what I think. Architecture of today does not have as much to do with culture as Loos insists. It hence must have more of an artistic quality to it. So, in the end, what is style? Loos in fact makes his definitions of architecture and style still quite vague. He keeps on telling us that his time period has a clear style of its own, but he

does not make it clear what indeed that style is. He just keeps on saying that the style keeps getting simpler and simpler, plainer and plainer, more and more unadorned. Yet it is not obvious that the buildings of today are all extremely unadorned. Unless the reason is that our culture has actually become less advanced as that of Loos time. If the style of 1800 differs by not very much from the style of 1900, then the same should be said of the style of 2000 and the style of 1900. Yet has style got lost when time walked into the 21st century? Indeed. The 21st century is filled with architects each having a different style; in the end, the schools are perhaps to the ones to be blamed or praised for this.