“Ornament is not a crime; according to Loos, the crime lies in its misuse,” architectural historian Christopher Long points out.

# Adolf Loos, Christopher Long, historie architektury, Od západu nefouká?, ornament, Petr Klíma, podcast, publikace

Vloženo29. 01. 2026

In the next episode of the podcast series on Adolf Loos, Petr Klíma talks to American art and architecture historian Christopher Long about his new book Adolf Loos: Ruminations and Revisions. Essays. Together they explore how Loos became a mythic figure and why he was long known mainly for his provocative writings, while his architectural work remained overlooked. Long also discusses how this image was reinforced by later interpretations in secondary literature as well as by Loos’s own reluctance to publicize and promote his architectural work.

The first part of the conversation focuses primarily on a new reading of the essay “Ornament and Crime” and on how Loos’s attitude toward ornament evolved over time. Long demonstrates that Loos’s famous formulation was not originally intended as a normative judgment, but rather as a description of a cultural and evolutionary process, referring mainly to objects of everyday use. He distinguishes between the early Loos, who observed these changes from a distance, and the later Loos, who—after a series of personal and professional disappointments—began to present himself as their initiator. The discussion thus develops into a broader reflection on why it is necessary today to reread Loos’s work in its full depth and within the historical context in which the architect’s ideas took shape.

The conversation is conducted in English.

What you’ll hear in the interview:

01:18 – Adolf Loos between myth and reality

“Part of the issue with Loos has been and continues to be how much he has been mythologized. So much of what one reads about Loos today in the secondary literature is very much conditioned by what people read about Loos, not what they read from Loos. So what I find continuously is that far too much of the literature simply – the secondary literature – simply repeats old, time worn and often incorrect ideas about what Loos thought, what he obviously believed, and what his intentions were. […] One of the things that I point out in several essays in the new book (Adolf Loos: Ruminations and Revisions. Essays, Prague 2025, editor’s note) is the extent to which Loos the architect, as opposed to Loos the polemicist, was ignored. And that was not well understood for a very long time, partly having to do with Loos himself, about what he was doing as an architect. And the reason I said has to do with himself is he didn’t allow photographs of his interiors to be made until around 1930. He also didn’t do what many architects do, which is he didn’t publicize himself. He didn’t send images to magazines, he didn’t write for magazines. He was surprisingly little known as an architect until early in the 1930s. And even then, he was not really fully understood. What he published were two books of essays: one in 1921, the second one in 1930. People read the essays, thought that they understood what Loos was about, and didn’t realize that the body of his work was incredibly profound and very important.”

08:21 – Loos’s intellectual standing

“Loos was very much an intellectual architect. There are, you could say, two kinds of architects. The kind of architects who sit at their drafting boards – nowadays at their computers – and work very visually. They put a line on. They look at this line, they think, oh, that line could be moved over here, that line could be moved over there. They construct essentially by manipulating the visual field, whether it’s three dimensional or two dimensional. Loos didn’t work that way.[…] You don’t see Loos producing a lot of sketches he does early on. Until about the time of the Michaelerplatz building (Goldman & Salatsch Building, editor’s note), there are sketches for that, for example, where you can see him starting to try to work out what he was doing, because he became very, very good after that of conceiving what he wanted in his mind and then putting it onto paper. So he’s an intellectual architect in that sense. […] This notion of Loos as the grand intellectual thinker of modernism is, in my view, simply false. Where Loos does reference other things, thoughts or other writers or other thinkers, they were mostly things that came out of the newspapers at the time. As Germans would say they were Tagesgespräch, things that people were talking about of the day. And I think an awful lot of them, as I say in the very first essay in the book, a lot of these ideas came from his friend Karl Kraus. Kraus was a real intellectual. He read these books, he knew them, and I’m sure he discussed them with Loos. And Loos picked those things up and generated thoughts, or I wouldn’t say generated thoughts, he adapted them into his thoughts. Loos as a thinker was primarily about someone who’s observed things and reacted to them.”

14:05 – Loos as a writer

“How does he come to be such a good writer? I think there were two things. He was remarkably good at talking. He was someone who talked incessantly. Everyone who records him notes that he has this ability to just sort of talk and talk and talk almost manically. And I think what he writes, what he does, is he simply records his own verbal gestures. I think he is literally writing as he’s talking. I think that’s part of it. The second part is what you allude to. I suspect that Kraus and Altenberg must have helped Loos early on, at least a little bit, to learn how to be very economical with his words. They also undoubtedly helped him, Kraus especially, get published. […] And Loos, I think, had a remarkable quality to write. So you’re quite correct to highlight that Loos is a very good writer. It’s very compelling as you read him. And as one reads him now, he sounds surprisingly modern. So Loos’s voice nowadays, although he makes references to things that are no longer part of our discussion, the way he uses words in German, is much closer to the way we would write now than the way that people were writing at the turn of the century.”

33:04 – Reconsidering Loos’s Essay “Ornament and Crime”

“Loos says: if you make all this ornament for objects of daily use, you’re doing something counter to this evolutionary process, and therefore it’s wrong. What he doesn’t say is that it’s a crime. What he says is that it’s criminals who do these sorts of things because they don’t know better. And so what he’s actually saying is criminals don’t know better, as does the Slovak peasant. He talks about the Slovak peasant woman, and she makes these nice, elaborate lace embroideries because that’s what she knows. And Loos says: That’s perfectly fine. Just as it’s perfectly fine for cannibals to eat people. That’s okay. That’s what they do. That’s who they are. […] He knows what he’s doing. He is very, very, very deliberate. He’s using these words to be incendiary. You know, he’s trying to light a fire. He’s trying to make a point. But he’s also quite careful about what he says, actually surprisingly careful. If you read the essay well, he’s actually very good at nuance. And the nuance suggests that it’s not ornament that’s a crime. It’s the misuse of ornament that’s the crime. So that’s the initial construct of his idea.”

Key figures, projects, and publications discussed:

Christopher Long, Adolf Loos: Ruminations and Revisions. Essays, Prague 2025.

Adolf Loos, Řeči do prázdna. 1897–1900 (Spoken into the void: collected essays, 1897-1900), Praha 2014.

Adolf Loos, Navzdory (Nevertheless), Praha 2015.

Karl Kraus (1874–1936). Source: Wikipedie.

Peter Altenberg a Adolf Loos (1959–1919). Source: Wikipedie.

Adolf Loos, Villa Moller in Vienna, 1927–1928. Source: WikiArquitectura.

Adolf Loos in collaboration with Karel Lhota, Müller’s Villa in Prague, 1928–1930. Photo: Matěj Baťha, 2007.

Prof. Christopher Long, Ph.D., studied at the universities of Graz, Munich, and Vienna, and received his doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin in 1993. From 1994 to 1995, he taught at the Central European University in Prague. His long-term focus is on the history of modern architecture, with a particular emphasis on Central Europe between 1880 and the present. Trained in history rather than architecture, he draws on approaches from cultural and intellectual history, as well as political and economic history. He has studied issues of cultural representation in architecture, the broader ideological context of architectural theory in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the development of architectural education. Professor Long’s interests also include modern design in Austria, the Czech lands, and the United States, as well as graphic design. He has worked on several exhibitions and publishes on a wide range of topics. In 2022, he received an honorary doctorate from the Prague Academy of Fine Arts and Design. Since 2017, six publications dedicated to the works of Adolf Loos and his contemporaries have been published in Czech translation. This year, they should be followed by a Czech version of the aforementioned book, Adolf Loos: Ruminations and Revisions. Essays.