Ornament and Crime

From the ornaments and the nature - based organic, linear decorations developed during the Art Nouveau we go to Adolf Loos rejection of any form of decoration and the absolute purity and austerity of architecture.
“Ornament and Crime “ is an essay included in the collection Trotzdem which appeared in 1931.
“ I have discovered the following truth and present it to the world: cultural evolution is equivalent to the removal of ornament from articles in daily use.”( Loos cited in Tournikiotis).
With this sentence Loos limits the suppression of the ornaments to the daily objects; he is against the ornamentation of the Viennese Secession, which he consider superfluous , but he exalts the grammar of the classical ornaments, which he actually use in his buildings, especially in the interiors(Tournikiotis,p. 23).
Towards the end of his career Loos formulated the theory of the “Raumplan” and the “Rufer House” has been the first building that portrays in its totality the architect’s concept of the spatial organization of a building. Just a couple of years before his death, one of his protégés, Ludwig Munz, wrote a definition of Loos Raumplan. The word “Raum” in german means room or space(Jara,p. 185); the Raumplan therefore is mainly the design of different rooms which are placed in different levels and vary in height and width according to their function. The windows are not rigidly ordered in sequences, but they are freely placed on the façade to illuminate there where it is needed. The exterior of the building then becomes a reflection of the interiors. Loos tacitly accepted this theory when Munz’ published his monograph and this gave further credence to his explanation of the Raumplan(Moffett, Fazio, Wodehouse, p.478) .
Reference:
Cynthia Jara Adolf Loos's "Raumplan" Theory Journal of Architectural Education (1984-), Vol. 48, No. 3 (Feb., 1995), pp. 185
M.Moffet, M.Fazio, L.Wodehouse, A world History of Architecture, , Laurence king publishing, 2003, London