Style is not a Four Letter Word

There has been a long and continuing feud in design between style and content, form and function, and even pleasure and utility, to which Charles Eames answered, “Who would say that pleasure is not useful?” Maybe we should call a truce, since it doesn’t seem like anyone is winning. Animosity towards style is pretty much a given in the design rhetoric of the twentieth century. But where did this antagonistic relationship between design and style come from? And more importantly, what has it done for us?

“Good design means as little design as possible.” —Dieter Rams, Omit the Unimportant

At the end of the stylistic excess and confusion of the Victorian era, the architect Adolf Loos led the way to a simpler, progressive, and more profitable future. In 1908 he proclaimed, “I have discovered the following truth and presented it to the world: cultural evolution is synonymous with the removal of ornament from articles in daily use. In his polemical and now famous essay “Ornament and Crime,” Adolf Loos established what would be the prevalent attitude towards ornament, pattern, decoration, and style in the twentieth century. He explained, “Shall every age have a style of its own and our age alone be denied one? By style they meant decoration. But I said, don’t weep! See, what makes our culture grand is its inability to produce a new form of decoration. We have overcome the ornament, we have won through the lack of ornamentation.”

Far from being a period without style, or new ornament, the end of the nineteenth century was inundated with ornament and style. The Jugendstil,Vienna Secession, Wiener Werkstätte, Art Nouveau, and Arts and Crafts were all in various stages of development. Loos was frustrated because a consensus on style no longer seemed possible, and he believed that “those who measure everything by the past impede the cultural development of nations and of humanity itself.”

Sounding like an early example of “compassionate conservatism,” he explains, “I suffer the ornament of the Kafir, that of the Persian, that of the Slovak farmer’s wife, the ornaments of my cobbler, because they all have no other means of expressing their full potential.” Loos’s condescending conceit became “received wisdom” in modernist design.

“The lack of ornament is a sign of intellectual power.” —Adolfe Loos, Ornament and Crime

In “Ornament and Crime,” we see the modernist project as fundamentalist, puritanical, elitism being promoted as progressive enlightenment. Probably very few designers have actually read it, yet they all know that ornament and style are, if not criminal, at least suspect. The idea that ornament, style, and pleasure are “degenerate” is reinforced today by the fact that pop culture literally wallows in them. The easiest way to differentiate yourself from the all-pervasive “nobrow" monoculture we inhabit is to reject its excesses. Just say “no”—to ornament and style.

But for Loos, the fact that ornament was a symptom of “degenerate” sensibilities was not its worst offence. The biggest problem he had with ornament was that it was not economical. As he explained,“ Decorated plates are expensive, while white crockery, which is pleasing to the modern individual, is cheap. Whilst one person saves money, the other becomes insolvent,” since “ the lack of ornament results in reduced working hours and an increased wage. The Chinese carver works sixteen hours, the American laborer works eight hours.” For Loos the modern American way, without ornament (or style and history), was not only the most progressive; it was the most cost-effective. Not surprisingly, Loos’s style of boxy masses of marble, glass, and wood became the style of corporate America.

Loos was successful at discrediting style and elevating function and economics as the primary goals in design as opposed to older ideas like “truth, beauty, and power.” But he did not achieve his main goal of eliminating ornament.

As James Trilling points out in his book, Ornament, A Modern Perspective, “He did something much more original. He reinvented it, with a completely new character and direction for the twentieth century.” He did this by carefully choosing natural substances like marble and wood for their decorative surface effects, which were natural and therefore “authentic.” Loos invented “an ornament without images, patterns, motifs, or history. Even this was not enough. Cloaking his achievement in a diatribe against ornament itself, he gave us the only ornament we could pretend was no ornament at all. We went after the decoy and swallowed it whole, a feat of self-deception that shapes our visual culture to this day.”

Instead of marginalizing their relationship to style, designers should be capitalizing on their role in developing it. Although they are unlikely to admit it, designers are implicit stylists and tastemakers. If they don’t articulate this role explicitly, they won’t have much to offer in the age of aesthetics. Culture is expressed and understood through style, which is mostly created and evaluated by designers.

In terms of aesthetics, art pretty much had the run of the twentieth century. Now in the twenty-first century, it’s design’s turn. We don’t need a new style or a clearly defined “period style.” Nor do we have to proclaim there are “no more rules” or that we should all go off on our own little “autonomous” way. There is no shortage of marginalized artistic geniuses in the world.

But if there are going to be design experts in the twenty-first century, what will they be experts in? Graphic designers claim that their expertise is in problem solving, communicating, organizing information, and branding. So to whom should people go for style and taste? Isn’t style too important to be left in the hands of amateurs?