Criminal Skins: Tattoos and Modern Architecture in the Work of Adolf Loos

Adolf Loos’s famous essay, ‘Ornament and Crime’, decisively linked unornamented architecture with the culture of modernity and, in so doing, became one of the key formulations of modern architecture. To a great extent, the essay’s force comes from arguments drawn from nineteenth-century criminal anthropology. Nevertheless, Loos’s work has been consistently understood only within the context of the inter-war avant- gardes. In the 1920s, Le Corbusier was particularly enthusiastic in bringing Loos’s work to the fore, thereby establishing its future reception. ‘Ornament and Crime’ became an essential catalyst for architecture’s conversion away from the historicism of the nineteenth century to modernism. At the turn of the century, Loos’s essay already foreshadowed the white abstraction of ‘less is more’ architecture and the functionalist rigour of the International Style which would dominate the twentieth century.


INTRODUCTION
Adolf Loos's famous essay, 'Ornament and Crime', decisively linked unornamented architecture with the culture of modernity and, in so doing, became one of the key formulations of modern architecture. 1 To a great extent, the essay's force comes from arguments drawn from nineteenth-century criminal anthropology. Nevertheless, Loos's work has been consistently understood only within the context of the inter-war avantgardes. In the 1920s, Le Corbusier was particularly enthusiastic in bringing Loos's work to the fore, thereby establishing its future reception. 2 'Ornament and Crime' became an essential catalyst for architecture's conversion away from the historicism of the nineteenth century to modernism. At the turn of the century, Loos's essay already foreshadowed the white abstraction of 'less is more' architecture and the functionalist rigour of the International Style which would dominate the twentieth century. While these later movements abandoned the essay's scientific basis as it became outdated, they nevertheless wholly embraced, incarnated and perpetuated the formal proscriptions of 'Ornament and Crime'. In this way they prolonged the ineffable presence of nineteenth-century criminal anthropology.
Violence against ornament characterized nineteenth-century critiques besides Loos's. Nietzsche, for example, condemned 'decorative culture' in his renowned 'On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life'. For him 'adornment' was a disease whose symptoms plagued historicist architecture just as much as they did contemporaneous historiography. 3 Nietzsche's parallel between ornament in architecture and that in historiography can be extended to modern architecture; by overlooking specific sites of knowledge production, historians of modernism have ornamentalized and effaced its extensive reliance on criminal anthropology.
Recently scholars have started to recover parallels between Loos's comments on tattoos and the work of the criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso, yet these authors continue to ignore the constitutive role of criminal anthropology in Loos's theorization of modern architecture. 4 This essay therefore details Loos's debt to criminal anthropology, by analyzing his arguments drawn from its 'Italian school' and by bringing to light the role of Haeckel's biogenetic principle and theories of atavism and degeneration. It will analyze how Loos's work fits into contemporaneous scientific theories of ornament (Darwin, Haeckel, Nordau and Lombroso), museological arrangements, and the prevailing aesthetic theories of ornamentation, as advanced by Gottfried Semper and Alois Riegl. It is through the concept of tattoos that all of these discourses merged, and therefore this concept will direct the argument of this essay.
In consequence the reading of 'Ornament and Crime' offered here will focus on Loos's extension of criminal anthropology's classificatory gaze from the human body to its material prostheses, the Gebrauchsgegenstande, or objects of everyday use. The proscriptions advanced in 'Ornament and Crime' for application to the entire field of material culture were derived from the taxonomy of marks established by criminal anthropology for distinguishing between normal and deviant bodies. The unornamented architecture and applied art called for by Loos were thus not only the 'liberating' equipment of modern life but also a means by which to distinguish those individuals, communities, nations, and races capable of participating in that life. Accordingly, to the many functions of unornamented architecture and applied art already enumerated by modernism's theoreticians and historians, should be added the function of marking social, political, and cultural differences, and thereby endowing those differences with a palpable and material existence.

LOOS A N D C R I M I N A L A N T H R O P O L O G Y
Loos's first 'battle cry against ornament' 5 appeared in 'The Luxury Vehicle', one of a series of articles written on the occasion of the Vienna Jubilee Exhibition of 1898. Instead of considering ornament as it had traditionally been understood, as an inherent feature of any artistic work, Loos saw it as a signifier of that work's level of cultural development. He insisted that carriages should be classified according to their degree of ornamentation. He relegated American carriages to an 'earlier' phase of development because they were ornamented with acanthus leaves. 6 Loos explained his 'history of civilization' in this essay on the exhibition: Let us briefly review a few chapters of the history of civilization. The lower the cultural level of a people, the more extravagant it is with its ornament, its decoration. The Indian covers every object, every boat, every oar, every arrow with layer upon layer of ornament. To see decoration as a sign of superiority means to stand at the level of the Indians. 7 For him, the ornaments on the American carriages showed 'the Indian in them'. 8 The triad of taste, race, and civilization was not exclusive to Loos's writings. These connexions were common in natural history and in the scientific discourse on man. Although scholars have frequently ignored this aspect of Darwin's work, taste occupied an essential role in his theory of evolution, where it was singularly important in determining evolutionary pathways. 9 Different races, Darwin explained, had different tastes, and these differences in taste, in turn, made races differ further, since mates considered the most attractive would be chosen first. Belonging to a certain race was therefore tantamount to exercising a certain taste, and vice versa. Darwin believed in the possibility that taste 'may in the course of time become inherited', for this would explain each race's 'own innate ideal of beauty'. 10 Darwin did not only invoke taste to explain the emergence of different races, but also used it to explain other cultural products, even artistic and architectural ones. Just as certain drakes preferred black and white ducks over highly ornamented ones, so civilized man preferred 'the Jupiter or Apollo of the Greeks' to the 'hideous bas-reliefs on the ruined buildings of Central America'. 11 In Darwin's theory of evolution, race, taste and civilization had already been linked together, scientifically. As the century progressed these connexions would be re-examined both from within the sciences and from aesthetic and architectural theory, sources from which Loos drew selectively. 12 In an article on women's fashion, published a few months after that on 'Luxury Vehicles', Loos repeated his argument about ornament but extended it to include women, Papuans, and criminals. Here, however, he began to present ornament as a mark of criminality, as well as of primitiveness, noting that, 'the Papuan and the criminal ornament their skin'. The excessive ornamentation of women's clothing '[demonstrates] to us that the woman has fallen behind sharply in her development in recent centuries'. 13 As women advance in their development, Loos predicted, their fashion will follow men's, and its elaborate ornamentation 'will disappear'. Papuans, alongside women, recurred throughout his work as a preferred example, most likely because they represented Germany's late nineteenth-century colonial adventure in New Guinea. 14 Loos saw women's fashion currently as being dictated by the prostitute and by the criminal. 15 For this reason, he continued, the best female fashion manuals were the articles in the Penal Code dealing with sexual crimes: 'The sentences meted out according to paragraphs 125 through 133 of our Penal Act are the most reliable fashion journal.' 16 For him, changes in women's fashion corresponded directly with changes in sexual crimes: in the 1870s and early 1880s fashion and crime alike demanded voluptuosity and flagellation, as exemplified in the novels and poetry of Sacher-Masoch, Catuelle Mendes and Armand Silvestre; then, in the later 1880s and early 1890s, fashion turned to the round and ripe femininity of Te cul de Paris'; and finally, at the turn of the century, the 'cry for youthfulness rang out', making the child-woman the coveted object of desire. 17 His correlation of ornament with the feminine, and alongside this the criminal, primitive and sexual, continued to pervade his work as it developed. 'In the final analysis', Loos wrote, 'women's ornament goes back to the savage, it has erotic significance.' 18 Loos infantilized, orientalized, feminized and criminalized specific Austrian and German architects and designers who employed ornament. In a private publication, which served as an architectural guide to his own work, he explained in this way how Secessionist architects such as Josef Olbrich, Henry Van der Velde and Josef Hoffman were still producing intensely decorated architecture. 19 While he considered himself to be a thoroughly modern man, these ornament-makers belonged to a different era: Only people, that, although they were born in the present, actually live in a past century, like women, peasants, orientals (including the Japanese), mutilated brains like tie and rug designers, create even today new ornaments, of the same value as antique In this article, Loos targeted applied art in general, but in particular current state employees of cultural institutions, 'barbarians of culture' who were forced by their 'Indian furour' to compulsively ornament. He appreciated ornament in 'the old master or the new oriental', where it 'emerged directly from their soul', but its existence in Austria and in Germany in his own time was a dangerous atavism. He reiterated his characteristic line: 'The incapacity of our culture to create a new ornament is a sign of its greatness. The evolution of humanity goes hand in hand with the disappearance of ornaments in every-day objects.' 21 In 'Architecture' (1910), Loos extended this criticism to the entire architectural profession, contrasting its ornamented creations with traditional 'peasant homes', which escaped his chastising.
Primitives, like children, criminals, degenerates and women, Loos wrote, were seized with an inescapable urge to ornament themselves and their surroundings. Yet as man evolved, he argued, the urge for ornament finally disappeared. In 'Ornament and Crime', Loos stated his famous dictum: T made the following discovery, which I passed on to the world: the evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornamentation from objects of everyday use.' 22 The 'discovery' that Loos claimed for himself, of focusing on decrease in ornamentation as a mark of evolution's forward march, was already present in the On the Origin of Species, and its association with criminality can be traced to the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso.

L O M B R O S O : O R N A M E N T I N C R I M I N A L A N T H R O P O L O G Y
Lombroso was well-known in the late nineteenth century for advocating a biological explanation of crime and for indicting sociological theories of criminality. According to him, the biological signs of criminality were readily visible. Material 'stigmata', both on the body and produced by the body, betrayed the criminal. 23 His L'Uomo Delinquente, first translated into German in 1887 and reprinted several times, was extremely popular, not only in turn-of-the-century Viennese scientific and medical circles but also in a much wider context. 24 The work of Loos, Lombroso and his disciple Max Nordau often appeared side by side, indicating that they addressed the same readership. References to Lombroso and to Nordau, for example, abound in the same publications in which Loos's work appeared: in the Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse, in Karl Kraus' journal Die Fackel, and in the Viennese architectural magazine Der Architekt. Loos's private correspondence reveals that he followed the work of Nordau closely, read the latest medical and biological research, and addressed similar audiences. 25 An important object common to both criminology and aesthetic and architectural theory was the tattoo. 26 The ornament and the tattoo were established as parallel forms of 'free beauty' in Kant's aesthetic theory, written at the very moment when tattoos were 'discovered' in Europe, after Captain Cook's expeditions to the South Seas; for Kant the connexion between ornament and tattoo was based on each element's 'uselessness', rather than on its primitivism. 27 A key change in the understanding of tattoos and theories of ornamentation had occurred by the middle of the nineteenth century. Darwin and others were struck by the 'primitive's' urge for tattoos. 28 Naturalists, who increasingly believed the early stages of the development of 'man' could be found in 'existing semi-civilized and savage nations', drew on and contributed to ongoing discourses that designated usage of ornament in general, and of tattoos in particular, as primitive. 'That [savages] have a passion for ornament', Darwin wrote, 'is notorious.' He went on to describe how they 'deck themselves with plumes, necklaces, armlets, ear-rings ... and paint themselves in the most diversified manner.' 'Ornaments', he concluded, 'are highly valued' in 'all barbarous races'. 29 The primitive's predilection for ornament was so frequently noted that another writer defined 'savages' as those who could 'not distinguish the superfluous from the necessary'. 30 While working with current associations of ornamentation and primitiveness, Lombroso added a third factor, criminality. According to him, the criminal and the primitive converge primarily through their use of one particular type of ornament, namely the tattoo. In L'Uomo Delinquente, Lombroso combined what had up to then been two separate strands of the literature on tattoos. The first, most significant body of literature that he consulted dealt with tattoos in primitives, from an anthropological perspective. 31 The second strand in his study of tattoos drew on the work of criminologists. 32 Lombroso merged these different interpretations of tattoos into one, arguing that -because of their atavistic nature -the criminal's urge for ornament was equivalent to the primitive's. 33 In 'Ornament and Crime', Loos followed Lombroso in linking criminals with primitives by means of the tattoo. Using the characteristic logic of the 'Italian school' of criminology, he wrote: A modern person who is tattooed is either a criminal or a degenerate. There are prisons in which eighty percent of the criminals are tattooed. Tattooed persons who are not in prison are either latent criminals or degenerate aristocrats. If someone who is tattooed dies in freedom, then he does so a few years before he would have committed murder. 34 Loos explained how 'the modern person who, due to an inner urge, marks walls with erotic symbols is either a delinquent (Verbrecher) or a degenerate (Degenerierter)'. 35 Like Lombroso he saw these marks as an unequivocal sign of evolutionary development: 'One can measure the cultural development of a country by the amount of graffiti on the bathroom walls.' In children and primitives this urge was understandable, but 'what is natural in the Papuan and the child is a sign of degeneration (Degenerationserscheinung) in modern man'. 36 Lombroso's focus on the tattoo as the distinguishing mark of the criminal and the primitive was part of his larger interest in other marks left by criminals. He obsessively investigated criminal sketches and drawings. Although historians have frequently described Lombroso's work on the physiognomy of the criminal, his extension of this same physiognomic logic from the criminal body to criminal 'culture' -graffiti, writings, paintings, jargon, and so on -has received almost no attention. At the time, however, his physiognomic study of the atavistic material culture of criminals was highly influential, founding a new mode of art criticism based largely on criminal anthropology. The use of natural history and criminology in the analysis of material culture characterized a school of art criticism that focused variously on evolution, degeneration, atavism and criminality. The most well-known proponent of this type of art criticism was Max Nordau, who considered art ranging from Monet to Zola as the result of these artists' physical degeneracy. While historians have frequently focused on the work of Nordau as an extreme example of degeneration theories in art, arguments drawn from natural history and evolution were commonplace in turn-of-the-cenrury architectural criticism. Loos's writings on architecture and fashion fit neatly within this discourse. 37 With the tattoo's ambiguous status as both on the body yet external to it, Lombroso's reading of the tattoo extended the boundaries of a physiognomic science that had only focused on the body to include material culture in general. In Palimsesti del Carcere, a book dedicated to cataloguing criminal inscriptions, Lombroso observed how the 'walls, drinking-vessels, planks of the prisoners' beds, margins of books, medicine wrappers, and even the unstable sands of the exercise-grounds ... supply [the criminal] with a surface on which to imprint his thoughts and feelings'. 38 The criminals' urge to draw was called 'graphomania'. This pictographic excess resulted from their atavism, which forced them to communicate in the hieroglyphic and symbolic manner of primitives.
Darwin's work had also suggested the extension of physiognomy to encompass material culture. Darwin stretched a physiognomic interpretation of races beyond the body, and applied it to an extended field that included firstly tattoos and then clothing, but also art and architecture. In so doing he completely blurred the boundaries between ornaments on the body and ornaments beyond it. In the Descent of Man he elided any distinction between facial decorations and acquired physical characteristics: As negroes and savages in many parts of the world paint their faces with red, blue, white, or black bars, -so the male mandrill of Africa appears to have acquired his deeply-furrowed and gaudily looking face from having been thus rendered attractive to the female. 39 Both Darwin's and Lombroso's conception of ornament exceeded the limits of the body to encompass the body's material prostheses, its cultural products. Through a physiognomic reading that denied a distinction between the criminal body and its material prostheses, Loos moved from a condemnation of bodily ornamentation in the form of the tattoo to a condemnation of ornamentation in all functional realms of culture.

A R C H I T E C T U R A L HISTORY 48: 2005 O R N A M E N T A N D C R I M E
Loos began his famous essay with Ernst von Haeckel's famous biogenetic principle, 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny'. Haeckel, one of the first popularizers in Germany of Darwin's theory of evolution, argued that the stages of an embryo's development correspond with the evolutionary development characteristic of its species. Loos summarized it succinctly: In the womb the human embryo goes through all phases of development the animal kingdom has passed through. And when a human being is born, his sense impressions are like a new-born dog's. In childhood he goes through all changes corresponding to the stages in the development of humanity. At two he sees with the eyes of a Papuan, at four with those of a Germanic tribesman, at six of Socrates, at eight of Voltaire. 40 He invoked Haeckel's mapping of the human developmental scale onto the evolutionary scale of the species as proof of the equivalence between children, women, primitives and criminals.
Criminal anthropologists seized on Haeckel's law to justify the crucial concept of atavism. Haeckel explained the existence of certain ornamental, superfluous traits (such as tails and redundant mammary glands in humans) as a result of latent heredity, atavismus. These traits, which according to the theory of natural selection should have disappeared, sometimes resurfaced in later generations. Haeckel explained these anomalies as instances of evolutionary regression, their parallel existence in ontogeny (for example, in a human embryo of one month) proving to him that they were remnants of a primitive form.
Nordau championed Haeckel and Lombroso in Vienna. He explained how, by using Haeckel's law, the anthropologist could catch a glimpse of primitive man in present-day children: 'According to the biological doctrine of evolution, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny ... consequently, one can study children to determine the mentality of the species at the beginning of its evolution.' 41 For Lombroso and Nordau, children, criminals and women represented an arrested development in which ornament flourished; they were modern-day embodiments that recalled primitive man. In 'Ornament and Crime', Haeckel's law was important not only because it placed modern, unornamented man in a privileged position vis-a-vis atavistic or primitive man, but also because it provided scientific justification for the superiority of 'modern' aesthetics.
When Loos wrote about ornament, he repeatedly turned to Haeckel's biogenetic principle and to Lombrosian concepts of criminality. These concepts appearconsistently -in his writings throughout nearly three decades. Even when extolling peasant culture, as he did in 'Architecture', Loos based his arguments on criminal anthropology. Almost twenty years after 'Ornament and Crime', Loos returned to the theme of atavism in 'Ornament and Education' (1924). He again equated primitives with children. Education was of primary importance because, 'to educate someone is to help them leave their primeval condition. Every child has to repeat the development that took mankind thousands of years'. 42 This development, once more, was marked by the disappearance of ornament from objects of daily use. After the appearance of On the Origin of Species the place of ornament in evolution moved to centre stage, not only in art history, but also within natural science. For a number of years Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, who shared most of Darwin's own views about the origin of the species, debated the existence of 'ornaments' that did not play functional roles. 43 Critics of natural selection pointed out that the existence of ornament in nature escaped the strictly mechanistic processes ostensibly described by Darwin. They maintained that Darwin's theory could not account for 'ornament' in nature. It could not explain the abundance of colour in certain organisms or ornamental traits that would hurt, instead of improve, an organism's chance of survival, like the peacock's tail or the Hottentot's steatopyga (Darwin's example of an unusual protuberance in the posterior part of the body). The Duke of Argyll, one of the most popular writers on evolution, argued that natural selection could not explain beauty. 44 Darwin responded to these objections in The Descent of Man. He acknowledged that 'mere physical conditions' could not account for ornamental traits, such as those 'beautiful and artistically coloured' caterpillars, birds, butterflies with 'gaudy plumage and ornaments', and the song of certain birds. He responded to the objection that natural selection stopped where ornament began by further developing his lesserknown theory of sexual selection. Darwin explained the anomaly of ornament by arguing that 'ornamental characters' were 'secondary sexual characters' used to attract the opposite sex. He thus accounted for natural elements clearly not determined by functional needs: ornament in nature, ranging from colour to song.

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With sexual selection, Darwin confronted other explanations of ornament advanced by people in his own field (for example, Wallace). In order to explain how ornament arose independently of the need for survival posited by natural selection, he proposed the idea that ornament had no functional determinants. Even clothing, typically seen in utilitarian terms, might have been 'first made for ornament and not for warmth'. 45 Alois Riegl, known for his opposition to mechanistic theories of ornamentation, agreed.
Semper, the predominant architectural theorist of the mid-nineteenth-century Germany and Austria, held a theory of ornament that contrasted with that of natural selection. For him, architectural ornament emerged organically from a specific cultural milieu, as a representation of a building's inner structure. He identified a building's 'cladding' (Bekleidung) as the complement to a building's internal tectonic structure, but also as a crucial representation of that structure in aesthetic terms. In Semper's words, 'cladding' transformed 'the completely material, structural, and technical prototype that was the dwelling ... into monumental form, out of which arose true architecture'} 6 'Cladding' was necessary to simultaneously conceal a building's inner structure and express that structure's ideal, original state; without cladding a building was merely the material it was made from, but cladding provided 'an external aesthetically palpable suggestion of what is invisibly there and represented'. 47 Semper correlated architectural cladding with clothing; as he wrote in Der SHI, 'almost all structural symbols ... are motives ... borrowed directly from the domain of costumes and, in particular, from its finery!'. 48 Even tattoos, Semper claimed, could be derived from the position and functions of subcutaneous muscles. 49 He did not, however, associate them with primitiveness.
In Der SHI, Semper did not confront the question of cultural evolution; written contemporaneously with Darwin, this work proposed a non-evolutionary classification system of fixed elements derived from the work of the French anatomist Georges Cuvier. 50 In his later work, however, he was forced to explicitly confront the theory of natural selection, and refused to accept that it played a role in the development of architecture. Nevertheless, a complete denial of the role of ornament in evolutionary theory would not last long. Architectural theorists writing after Semper would no longer be able to escape the issue of ornament and natural selection. If ornament was Echoing Darwin's critics, Riegl noticed how the evolution of ornament did not follow the strict, mechanistic development of natural selection. Writing after the publication and popularization of Darwin's On the Origin of Species and contemporaneously with Loos, he could not simply posit all architecture as unaffected by evolution, as Semper had done before him. Instead, Riegl regarded ornament as the one and only architectural element not governed by evolutionary forces. There 'unquestionably was a close and causal relationship between Darwinism and artistic materialism: the materialist interpretation of the origin of art is nothing other than Darwinism imposed upon an intellectual discipline'. 51 His work represented a shift away from 'the materialist, scientific worldview, first promulgated by Lamarck and Goethe and subsequently brought to maturity by Darwin'. 52 Riegl correlated Semper's interpretation of artistic work on the basis of technologies and materials with Darwin's concept of natural selection, and contrasted both with his own, which invoked 'conscious, artistic invention'. 53 One of the key examples on which Riegl's re-reading of Semper turned was the tattoo, a reading first articulated in his review of a collection of Maori art brought to Vienna's Museum of Natural History in 1890. 54  existed between technology, structure, and ornament. The Maori's spirals were, he wrote, both carved out of wood and stone and tattooed on the skin, with neither process related to the spinning of textiles. 55 Riegl argued that the practice of tattooing even 'preceded' that of wearing clothes. He underscored the indeterminacy of tattooing practices to support Riegl's thesis on the primacy of aesthetic drives over the accommodation of utilitarian needs. As he wrote in Stilfragen, 'the human desire to adorn the body is far more elementary than the desire to cover it... the decorative motifs that satisfy the simple desire for adornment... surely existed before textiles were used for physical protection'. 56 Riegl termed the fundamental aesthetic drive Kunstwollen, or 'artistic will'. In his account, Kunstwollen was revealed through those elements of architecture and applied art not determined by functional exigencies. In contrast to Semper, ornament thus became a mere trace of a cultural force, a trace not determined by its relation to any other part of the architectural ensemble. 57 In Riegl the tattoo was explicitly presented as the ur-ornament, an ornament which provided no material protection for the body, and thus, as the product of a purely artistic drive: 'Do we not still encounter Polynesian tribes today who do without any form of clothing, while they tattoo their bodies from head to toe, thereby making full use of linear decorative techniques?' 58 The work of art or architectural historians such as Semper and Riegl converged with that of Darwin and other naturalists in that the architectures they described were primarily bodily. These conceptions of ornament bridged the animate and the inanimate, and crossed from private to public spheres. Loos continued to use the tattoo as a nexus between bodies and architectures, and continued to focus on the 'primitives' of New Guinea. He incorporated criminal anthropology into these traditions by defining ornament through its identity with the criminal and the primitive.
Loos's key contribution to architecture theory was to tie ornament directly to cultural evolution, a move which implied that every aspect of architecture and applied art was determined in the final instance by natural selection. This was precisely the move that his predecessors in architectural theory, such as Semper and Riegl, had resisted. Even Darwin fought against this in his later work. The basis for Loos's argument was Lombrosian criminal anthropology. In police work, all manner of signifiers, including those regarded as purely aesthetic in artistic or architectural terms, were related to levels of criminality. 59 While artistic and architectural theories were based on the split between the purely aesthetic and the functional, according to Lombroso all cultural phenomena were functional, even if only as markers of cultural evolution. That which architectural theory attempted to disengage from the imperatives of evolution and establish as the product of pure aesthetic production, criminal anthropology took as itself a mark of evolutionary and criminal development.

THE INCARCERATION OF FRIMITIVISM
Loos's evolutionary view of architecture resurfaced when he was asked to design a building for the Mexican parliament. Instead of following his 'modern' logic, he turned to pre-Colombian architecture. There, he applied different principles than in Austria, since natural selection should have ensured that ornament would evolve out of existence in modern civilization. 60 Modern ornament was an impostor in civilized cultures, a non-signifier through which one could no longer read the culture that produced it: Because ornament is no longer organically linked with our culture, it is also no longer an expression of our culture. Ornament as created today has no connexion with us, has no human connexion at all, no connexion with the current world-order. 61 Modern civilization, then, should therefore evolve in parallel with the disappearance of ornament from objects of daily use.
Loos did not, however, always oppose ornament. Rather it was the melange of applied art, institutionalized in the Wiener Werkstatte, the Kunstgewerbeschule and the Deutscher Werkbund, which he abhorred. 62 In fact, he not only tolerated but admired ornament in primitives. 63 As the Papuans evolved, their ornaments would one day reach the level of the moderns, and become extinct: 'The Papuans can invent new ornaments, until they reach the total absence of ornamentation.' 64 The problem came when modern man tried to contrive a new ornament: T do not consider the invention of new ornaments as a new force, rather -in civilized man -it is a sign of degeneration.' 65 Loos preached the exclusion of ornament from the applied arts, but welcomed it in the 'pure' or fine arts, where the primitive Drang could run rampant. His acceptance of primitivism in the fine arts can particularly be seen in his relationship with the painter Oskar Kokoschka. As the historian Carl E. Schorske has noted, Loos's relationship with Kokoschka, 'symbolized a wholly new relationship between fine and applied art'. 66 Yet even before Loos 'rescued' Kokoschka from painting women's fans and postcards, he had already theorized a profoundly different relationship between ornament, art and primitivism.
Loos criticized ornament only in modern Gebrauchsgegenstande, whilst he entirely accepted it in pure art. In an article criticizing the Deutscher Werkbund, Loos Kunstchau, 1908(Vienna, 1983, p. 23) place for art in his history of civilization qua history of the emancipation from ornaments in everyday objects. As a culture developed, Loos wrote, ornament disappeared from Gebrauchsgegenstande, but continued in the pure arts: The ornament in every-day objects is the beginning of art. The black Papuan covers all of his utensils with ornaments. The history of humanity shows how art seeks to liberate itself from its profanation, emancipating itself from every-day objects, from the industrial product. 67 In 1906, the year in which Loos met Kokoschka, he explained -in an article appropriately titled 'Cultural Degeneration' -that, 'overall, modern man considers the combination of art and every-day objects as the greatest humiliation'. 68 Impressed by Kokoschka's poster for the Art Exhibition, he promised to help him, but only if he left applied art.
The separation between applied and fine arts appeared in Loos's earliest work. In his criticism of the Kunstgewerbeschule, published in 1897, he wrote that, 'Applied to industry, even the best paintings offend'. 69 Furthermore, in the guidelines for the art administration which he later supported, the separation between applied and fine arts was enforced strictly. He insisted that the education of artists 'should be trusted to the School of Fine Arts and not the School of Applied Art'. 70 The School of Applied Arts should never attempt to educate artists or sculptors, who should be trained exclusively in the fine arts tradition (architects requiring a completely different training).
For Loos the fine arts arose from the primitive, savage and erotic urge to ornament: 'The urge to decorate one's face and everything within reach is the origin of the fine arts.' 71 In modern cultures, Loos wrote, 'art is the substitute for ornament'. 72 Ornament, he explained, 'because of its primitivism, comes close to art'. 73 Because Loos did not permit either ornament or artistic intervention in objects of daily use, he trapped them within canvases. The fine arts were the only place where ornament could be lawfully used. CONCLUSION It is a truism that modern design and architecture were characterized by a thorough elimination of ornament. The question that we have attempted to broach here is what exactly became constituted as ornamental and why. A variety of discourses from evolutionary theory, natural history and criminal anthropology defined ornament in art and architectural theory. Slippages from physiognomies to Gebrauchsgegenstande revealed places where ornament was defined both scientifically and architecturally. These slippages, and the definitions of ornamentation produced by them, continued to affect architecture long after nineteenth-century criminology was abandoned.
Science and architecture converged in the concept of the tattoo, whose ambiguous status -on the body yet external to it -made it interstitial to both of these disciplines. Semper's, Riegl's and Loos's uses of the concept of tattoo revealed how theories of ornamentation were defined alongside discourses on tattooing used in evolutionary theory and criminal anthropology. Scientists and art historians investigated, at the same time, the physiognomy of the human body and of its material culture.
Specific references, dialogues and exchanges constituted the interstitial, prosthetic discourses which defined ornament. For example, both Semper and Riegl dealt explicitly with tattooing and with Darwin's concept of ornamentation; Riegl studied Maori art and reprinted images of tattooed 'primitives' published by John Lubbock; Loos referred to Max Nordau, employed the 'Italian School' of criminology's concept of tattoo, invoked Haeckel's 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny' law, and showed how atavism could explain retrograde architecture and design. Scientists were also vocal on matters of design and architecture. Darwin believed his evolutionary theory proved the superiority of Greek art and that coloured lines on a gorilla's face explained primitive tattooing practices; Haeckel explained ornament through atavism; and Lombroso analyzed criminal inscriptions, tattoos and pottery with the keen eye of an art historian. These connexions and cross-references all appear in the contested skins marked by ornament as feminine, primitive and criminal. More importantly, they show how primitives, criminals and women were, in turn, ornamentalized. While Darwin, Haeckel, Nordau and Lombroso defined ornament variously as primitive, sexual, monstrous, and criminal, Loos incorporated these discourses into aesthetic and architectural theory.
The separation of the fine arts from the applied arts that Loos defended was but one instance of the many boundaries of modern life that upheld the social order, managed deviance, and indelibly defined individual and collective subjectivities. The order represented by the museological spaces that were aptly the birthplace of Loos's theory, and the resulting incarceration of 'primitive' art within them, conspired as boundaries marking and managing participation in modernity.
Critiques of the modern architecture which Loos promoted have tended to be made on the basis of Marxist cultural theory, in which it is presented as an unwitting tool of either capitalist planning, or linguistic and literary theory, where it is seen as semantically impoverished or syntactically undefined. What has passed through the analytical grid of each of these critiques is the folding of modernist architecture within systems of discipline, control and incarceration based on politics of personal and social identity, an enmeshing which is typified in modern deployments of ornament.
The design of our most immediate objects of daily use -the saltshakers, wallets, underwear, and food products studied by Loos -was shaped by these interstitial discourses. The qualities of superfluous (Uberflussig), degenerate (Entartung) and criminal (Verbrechen) were identified with ornament simultaneously in natural history, medicine, criminal anthropology and architectural and aesthetic theory. In the late nineteenth century ornament became the preferred boundary between the normal and the pathological, and between the functional and the arbitrary, in art and architecture alike. Hence to the many virtues of modern design -such as functional, modern, useful, and lawful -we re-establish as essential (and not 'ornamental') its opposites in modern life: dysfunctional, primitive, useless and criminal. 5 Loos, Ins leere gesprochen (Paris and Zurich, 1921). The attribution of first 'battle cry against ornament' appeared in a note to the 1932 edition of Ins leere gesprochen (Innsbruck, 1932). 6 It is important to note that Loos focused on the acanthus motif, whose significance in art theory can be traced back to Vitruvius.