In the essay Ornament and Crime Adolf Loss argues (Loos, 1908)that a civilizations “progress” can be measured by the degree to which it has spurned ornament. I agree with his idea that ornament should be removed from objects of daily use. Yes ornament can be nice to look at, but from a functional and economic perspective ornament is absolutely unnecessary. As today most every day use products are mass produced, and function based there is not point making them look pretty and spending hours to make each one individual and beautiful. The beauty of an object should aid its aesthetics and not overwhelm its functional use through ornament, and ornamented object can strong decrease its aesthetical value as well as compromise its functional use. Ornamented objects are also economically inefficient as creating individual ornamented objects for everyday use is not cost effective and wastes time. Being mass produced such products can be largely distributed with a primary purpose of function, solving the exact problems people have. Whereas ornamented objects take long as they are often hand crafted and for that reason require a higher value for money, which is not economically efficient. I believe that he is correct that the removal of ornament is progression in society as everything we do to progress as people is to make life easier and to benefit us. As mass producing functional products designed around function, carrying on to ornament objects would go against this and take us back not bring us forward. For example this chair from the Renaissance may look very beautiful and be the only one of its kind, and at the time may be very relevant to its culture. But to continue to ornament products like this today would not be cost effective and would bring us backwards in our evolution as a society and the progression of our culture.
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