Judgment, Kant grounded this norm philosophically in the formula of ‘pur-posiveness
without a purpose’ (Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck). The formula reflects an essential
impulse in the judgment of taste. And yet it does not account for the historical dynamic.
Based on a language stemming from the realm of materials, what this language defines as
necessary can later become superfluous, even terribly ornamental, as soon as it can no
longer be legitimated in a second kind of language, which is commonly called style.
What was functional yesterday can therefore become the opposite tomorrow. Loos was
thoroughly aware of this historical dynamic contained in the concept of ornament. Even
representative, luxurious, pompous and, in a certain sense, burlesque elements may
appear in certain forms of art as necessary, and not at all burlesque. To criticise the
Baroque for this reason would be philistine. Criticism of ornament means no more than
criticism of that which has lost its functional and symbolic signification. Ornament
becomes then a mere decaying and poisonous organic vestige. The new art is opposed to
this, for it represents the fictitiousness of a depraved romanticism, an ornamentation
embarrassingly trapped in its own impotence. Modern music and architecture, by
concentrating strictly on expression and construction, both strive together with equal
rigour to efface all such ornament. Schönberg’s compositional innovations, Karl Kraus’s
literary struggle against journalistic clichés and Loos’s denunciation of ornament are not
vague analogies in intellectual history; they reflect precisely the same intention. This
insight necessitates a correction of Loos’s thesis, which he, in his open-mindedness,
would probably not have rejected: the question of functionalism does not coincide with
the question of practical function. The purpose-free (zweckfrei) and the purposeful
(zweckgebunden) arts do not form the radical opposition which he imputed. The
difference between the necessary and the superfluous is inherent in a work, and is not
defined by the work’s relationship—or the lack of it—to something outside itself.
In Loos’s thought and in the early period of functionalism, purposeful and
aesthetically autonomous products were separated from one another by absolute fact.
This separation, which is in fact the object of our reflection, arose from the contemporary
polemic against the applied arts and crafts (Kunstgewerbe).^5 Although they determined
the period of Loos’s development, he soon escaped from them. Loos was thus situated
historically between Peter Altenberg and Le Corbusier. The movement of applied art had
its beginnings in Ruskin and Morris. Revolting against the shapelessness of mass-
produced, pseudo-individualized forms, it rallied around such new concepts as ‘will to
style’, ‘stylization’ and ‘shaping’, and around the idea that one should apply art,
reintroduce it into life in order to restore life to it. Their slogans were numerous and had a
powerful effect. Nevertheless, Loos noticed quite early the implausibility of such
endeavours: articles for use lose meaning as soon as they are displaced or disengaged in
such a way that their use is no longer required. Art, with its definitive protest against the
dominance of purpose over human life, suffers once it is reduced to that practical level to
which it objects, in Hölderlin’s words: ‘For never from now on/Shall the sacred serve
mere use.’ Loos found the artificial art of practical objects repulsive. Similarly, he felt
that the practical reorientation of purpose-free art would eventually subordinate it to the
destructive autocracy of profit, which even arts and crafts, at least in their beginnings,
had once opposed. Contrary to these efforts, Loos preached for the return to an honest
handicraft^6 which would place itself in the service of technical innovations without
having to borrow forms from art. His claims suffer from too simple an antithesis. Their
Rethinking Architecture 6