Adolf Loos Quotes

Be not afraid of being called un-fashionable.

Supply and demand regulate architectural form.

Every period had its style: why was it that our period was the only one to be denied a style? By "style" was meant ornament. I said, "weep not. Behold! What makes our period so important is that it is incapable of producing new ornament. We have out-grown ornament, we have struggled through to a state without ornament. Behold, the time is at hand, fulfilment awaits us. Soon the streets of the cities will glow like white walls! Like Zion, the Holy City, the capital of heaven. It is then that fulfilment will have come.

The Potemkin city of which I wish to speak here is none other than our dear Vienna herself.

The law courts must appear as a threatening gesture toward secret vice. The bank must declare: here your money is secure and well looked after by honest people.

It does not do to use it with forms whose origin is intimately bound up with a specific material simply because no technical difficulties stand in the way.

The work of art shows people new directions and thinks of the future. The house thinks of the present.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century we abandoned tradition, it's at that point that I intend to renew it because the present is built on the past just as the past was built on the times that went before it.

Be truthful, nature only sides with truth.

Does it follow that the house has nothing in common with art and is architecture not to be included in the arts? Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else that fulfils a function is to be excluded from the domain of art.

The unadorned gentleman's suit was the product of the change from rigid status to social structures constantly shifting in response to the forces of modern capitalism, becoming ever more egalitarian in both appearance and reality.

The house has to serve comfort. The work of art is revolutionary; the house is conservative.

Tattooed men who are not behind bars 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.

If we find a mound six feet long and three feet wide in the forests, formed into a pyramid, shaped by a shovel, we become serious and something says, "someone lies buried here"... Now that is architecture.

I will not subscribe to the argument that ornament increases the pleasure of the life of a cultivated person, or the argument which covers itself with the words: "But if the ornament is beautiful! ... " To me, and to all the cultivated people, ornament does not increase the pleasures of life. If I want to eat a piece of gingerbread I will choose one that is completely plain and not a piece which represents a baby in arms of a horserider, a piece which is covered over and over with decoration. The man of the fifteenth century would not understand me. But modern people will. The supporter of ornament believes that the urge for simplicity is equivalent to self-denial. No, dear professor from the College of Applied Arts, I am not denying myself! To me, it tastes better this way.

the development of culture is concurrent with the removal of ornaments from objects of daily use