Massey New Necessities Perspecta 35 2004

7/29/2019 Massey New Necessities Perspecta 35 2004

1/22

New NecessitiesJonathan Massey

For an overview of Bragdons career,

see Blake McKelvey, Claude F.

Bragdon, Architect, Stage Designer,

and Mystic, Rochester History, 29:4

(October 1967), 120.

Fi

g.

ClaudeBragdon,photographedin1897

Architectural ornament played a key role in the represen-

tation of power within sixteenth- and seventeenth-centurycourt societies. Ornamental magnificence displayed the

position of its bearer along a scale that ran from

commoner to king. In absolutist France, this representa-

tional system was codified through the architectural

doctrine ofconvenance, usually translated as appropri-

ateness or decorum. Treatise writers such as Philibert de

lOrme, Pierre Lemuet, and Michel de Fremin instructed

architects on the proper use of the orders and other

marks of architectural distinction to accurately represent

the clients status. The design code ofconvenance was one

of many ways that aristocratic society regulated self-presentation. Informal behavioral codes were buttressed

by legislative codes: sumptuary laws regulated ornamen-

tation in dress, dishware, coaches, and domestic furnish-

ings such as cabinets and draperies.

Architectural modernism emerged from the break-

down of this doctrine ofconvenance. Beginning with

eighteenth-century revolutionary architects such as

Etienne-Louis Boulle and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, new

criteria such as utility, convenience, economy, and

functional expressiveness began to displace the represen-

tation of social status through gradations of magnifi-cence. These criteria, which reflected the values of a

rising middle class, eventually became normative for

twentieth-century architectural modernism. One index of

this transformation is the changing status of ornament:

a central ancien rgime technique of adequation between

social structure and architectural representation,

ornament became by the turn of the twentieth century

a vestige of outmoded economies to be eliminated or

sublimated into forms suitable to disinterested aesthetic

appreciation.


2/22

Modernist Aesthetic Discipline

113

It is customary to understand this transformation as

a process of autonomization wherein architecture soughtout laws of expression internal to the discipline ratherthan given by social and political structure. Such aninterpretation misrecognizes the nature of power inliberal modernity, however. This essay draws on the workof Jrgen Habermas and Michel Foucault to suggest thatarchitectural modernism did not so much make architec-ture independent of social structure as develop newtechniques of regulation appropriate to liberal society.Through a case study of the system of projectiveornamentdeveloped in 1915 by American architect

Claude Bragdon, it argues that early-twentieth-centurymodernisms reconstituted convenance based on newsocial ideals and modalities of power. Bragdonsmodernist ornament aimed to persuade individuals toconform voluntarily to practices in line with whatBragdon saw as social necessities. An examination of hisuse of a sumptuary rhetoric to regulate architecturalornament reveals parallels to the strategies that moreinfluential modernists such as Hermann Muthesius andAdolf Loos used to eliminate or sublimate ornament.Examining these stances toward ornament as instances

of sumptuary regulation suggests that modernistarchitectural discourse reflects both the rise of the publicsphere as an arena of political deliberation and theoperation of the modality of power that Foucaultcharacterized as discipline.

Projective ornament

Claude Bragdon (18661946: Fig. 1) was a Rochester,New York, architect and critic who contributed to thedevelopment of modernism by developing a distinctivemode of progressive architecture.1 Bragdons career

spanned many fields, from architecture and theater

design to writing, publishing, and the graphic arts. In the1890s, after apprenticeships with the Buffalo firm Greenand Wicks and New York architect Bruce Price, Bragdonopened a practice in Rochester, where he was active inArts and Crafts circles. His designs for posters andmagazine covers distinguished him as a graphic artist,and his journalism soon gained him a reputation as oneof Americas foremost architecture critics. As a support-ive critic, then as editor of the republished KindergartenChats, he was a leading interpreter of Louis Sullivan toprofessional and general audiences from the turn of the

century into the 1930s. Bragdon developed professionaland personal ties not only to Sullivan, but also to FrankLloyd Wright, Ralph Adams Cram, Bertram Goodhue,Irving K. Pond, and Lewis Mumford. As one ofRochesters leading architects, he built many houses andsignificant public buildings, including police stations, a, a Chamber of Commerce, and a new terminal forthe New York Central Rail Road. At the end of WorldWar I, Bragdon closed his architectural practice topursue writing and stage design. Moving to New York,he established himself as a practitioner of the modernist

staging technique known as the New Stagecraft.Bragdons theater work extended into the 1930s, and hiswriting continued up to his death in 1946. His majorbooks on architecture are The Beautiful Necessity (1910),Projective Ornament (1915), Architecture and Democracy(1918), and The Frozen Fountain (1932). In addition tothese, Bragdon published many books and articles onmysticism, Theosophy, the new woman, and the fourthdimension of space.

Beyond advocating modernism in his architecturalcriticism, magazine pieces, and books, Bragdon created


3/22

in 1915 a modernist ornamental canon he calledprojective ornament2 (Figs. 2 and 3). He developedprojective ornament as a comprehensive response tomodernity, a new generalizationreflecting develop-ments in science (theorization ofn-dimensional space);technology (exploitation of invisible wavelengths forrepresentation and communication); and society (thevastly enlarged scale of social organization in anexpanding industrial economy). By folding these andother factors into his system of ornament, Bragdonsought to create a single ornamental language suitable tothe full range of modern programs and contexts.

Bragdon based projective ornament on his convictionthat the key to modernity lay in recognition of the fourthdimension of space. One of the great accomplishments ofnineteenth-century mathematics had been G. B. F.Riemanns 1854 reconceptualization of space as amanifold that could possess a variable and potentially

infinite number of dimensions.3

Riemanns theorizationofn-dimensional space challenged the authority ofEuclidean geometry and laid the groundwork for thelater discoveries of Hermann Minkowski and AlbertEinstein. At the same time, his work inspired a largeparascientific literature that posited a fourth spatial

114Massey New Necessities

Bragdons system of ornament ispresented in Claude Bragdon, Projec-tive Ornament (Rochester: ManasPress, 1915). For a detailed examina-tion of projective ornament, seeJonathan Massey, Architecture andInvolution: Claude Bragdons Projec-tive Ornament 19151946 (..dissertation, Princeton University,2001).

Riemanns June 10, 1854 lectureber die Hypothesen, welche derGeometrie zu Grunde liegen, whichfirst presented his theory ofn-dimen-sional space, was published in Abhand-lungen der Kniglichen Gesellschaft der

Wissenschaften zu Gttingen, 13(1868). It appeared in an Englishtranslation by William KingdonClifford as On the Hypotheses whichLie at the Bases of Geometry, Nature,8 (1873), 1417, 367. For an overviewof changing theorizations of space, seeMax Jammer, Concepts of Space: TheHistory of Theories of Space in

Physics, 3rd edn. (New York: Dover,1994). The best account of the discourse

of the fourth dimension of space andits significance for modern art is LindaDalrymple Henderson, The FourthDimension and Non-Euclidean Geom-

etry in Modern Art (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1983;forthcoming in an expanded secondedition).


4/22

dimension as the explanation for occult phenomena andmystical experiences. Popularized as a discourse of thefourth dimension of space, Riemanns discovery becamea vehicle for social critiques and spiritual visions,including those of Theosophy, the spiritual science thathad emerged in the 1870s as one of the many newreligions of the era.4

Bragdon was a leading American advocate ofTheosophy, and he based his approach to virtually everyissue on Theosophical doctrine, even if he frequentlyreinterpreted it creatively to engage other thoughtsystems and cultural domains. During the 1910s and1920s, he promulgated a spiritualized conception of thefourth dimension that echoed nineteenth-centuryProtestant visions of the City of God. Building on Theo-sophical doctrine, he claimed that the fourth dimensionwas a physically real space within which humanity wouldrealize millennial dreams of harmony and transcendence.

Bragdon created projective ornament in large part todisseminate this higher space theory. Many of histechniques for generating projective ornament patternsconsisted of projections and unfoldings of four-dimensional geometries ways of translating them intomore familiar three- and two-dimensional spaces.

By introducing viewers to Bragdons spiritualizedconcept of higher space, projective ornament wouldadvance humanity toward its transcendent future.

Projective ornament combined three kinds ofpatterns. One was based on what Bragdon called magiclines in magic squares. These are the lines created bytracing in ascending numerical order the numbers in amagic square, an arrangement of sequential numbersinto a square, each column, row, and diagonal of whichsums to the same number. Tracing the magic lines ofdifferent magic squares, Bragdon created patterns hethen used as templates for ornamental figures anddecorative fields (Fig. 4). A second basis for the patternsof projective ornament was graphic projection of thePlatonic solids. Bragdon produced two-dimensionalprojections of these three-dimensional solids in twoways: by unfolding them onto a plane, much as onemight flatten a cardboard box by cutting it at certain

vertices and unfolding it; and through axonometricprojection (Fig. 5). The third basis for the patterns ofBragdons system of ornament was an extrapolation ofthe second: simulated axonometric projections ofhypersolids, the four-dimensional correlatives to thePlatonic solids. Four-dimensional polyhedroids such as

115

Fig. (left) Claude Bragdons projectiveornament designsFig. (center) Projective ornament

patterns applied to interior paneling, trim,and textilesFig. (right) One of Bragdons explana-tions of the process for generating magiclines from magic squares, framed bya projective ornament pattern based onmagic lines


5/22

the tesseract, the four-dimensional extrapolation of thecube, could be described mathematically and geometri-cally, but they could not be built or seen. To make thesesublime shapes visible, after a fashion, Bragdon followedconventions of mathematical representation andextrapolated from conventional axonometric projection.He projected the additional dimension along a fourthaxis, thereby representing the fourth perpendicularthe hypothetical direction in which four-dimensionalspatial extension was to be found. This techniquegenerated graphic figures that simulated axonometricviews of four-dimensional hypersolids (Fig. 6).

By selectively accentuating and repeating elementsof these different patterns and projections, Bragdonturned them into ornament (Fig. 7). He hoped thatexposure to projective ornament would habituate viewersto seeing space as a series of dimensional translations:from the two-dimensional space of the picture plane, to

the three-dimensional space of bodies and buildings, tothe four-dimensional space of democratic and Theo-sophical communion. This dimensional sequencereflected Bragdons familiarity with Platos cave allegory.Projective ornament was intended to help peopleconfined to the caveof three-dimensional space


Fig. (left) Three-dimensional poly-hedrons, projected and unfolded into two

dimensionsFig. (center) Selected four-dimensionalpolyhedroids, projected into two dimen-sions and translated into ornamentFig. (right) Projections and magic linestranslated into ornament through selectivemanipulation, repetition, and filling


6/22

prisoners of phenomenality recognize their deceptionand break out into the lightful realm of ideas: the fourthdimension.

Within this mystical framework, projective ornamentaddressed the more mundane problems of ProgressiveEra American society. One of Bragdons primary aims increating a universal ornament was to integrate a societydivided by distinctions of class, language, and nationalorigin. Discomfited by the class antagonisms of industrialsociety, Bragdon criticized liberal modernity for beingexcessively individualistic and materialistic. He tookthese distinctions to jeopardize social coherence anddemocratic political traditions. In response, he enlistedarchitecture in the construction of a common culture.Approaching architectural progressivism in communica-tive terms, Bragdon envisioned projective ornament as auniversal architectural form-languageto replace theornament of the historical architectural styles. In its

project of simplifying and abstracting ornament tobroaden its intelligibility, projective ornament was anarchitectural analogue to language reforms such as BasicEnglish, Simplified Spelling, and Esperanto. Universalornament would turn architecture from a technique ofdifferentiation and distinction into one of integration.

Abstraction played a fundamental role in Bragdonsarchitectural reform project. Ornament marked stylisticdifference by deploying a specialized vocabulary offorms associated with a particular period and place, andoften by representing regionally specific foliage. Byabstracting ornament into geometric patterns and regulararabesques, Bragdon sought to make it universallylegible, requiring neither special linguistic competencynor culturally particular knowledge. He resorted togeometry not only to visualize dimensional sequencesbut also because, as a formal manifestation of mathemat-ics, it was universally intelligible to human reason.

The geometric basis of projective ornament alsomarked Bragdons search for an impersonal mode ofarchitectural expression. The individualism of hismentor Sullivan and rival Wright struck Bragdon as amisguided expression of the individualist ethos of liberalmodernity. Bragdon saw the rigorous objectivity of

geometric form as a more suitable basis than individualvirt for an egalitarian and assimilationist architecturalmode. Geometry and regularity provided designstrategies that were objective rather than subjective.Bragdon developed techniques to express this objectiv-ity in graphic terms: crisp black-and-white linework

117


7/22

gave his drawings an impersonal cast. The linear forms ofprojective ornament could be translated into buildingmaterials such as brick, tile, and textile without thepersonalizing effect of handicraft (Fig. 8).

Bragdons impersonal universalism was based on hissense that industrial capitalism was at odds with therealization of democratic social ideals. The specializationand differentiation at the core of industrial processseemed antithetical to democratic egalitarianism, as wellas to the viability of the shared public discourse neces-sary for deliberative self-government. But Bragdonsuniversalism also manifested his commitment toTheosophy. By fusing the cosmology of ancient Easternsacred texts such as the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita with the discoveries of modern Western science,Theosophy proposed to reintegrate science with religionand create a worldwide brotherhood of man. Theimpersonality and universalism of projective ornament

reflected Bragdons Theosophical convictions.Projective ornament reflected on the problem ofconsensus in democratic society by constructing anallegory of voluntary conformity. Bragdons ornamentaldesigns were structured by the tension between geomet-ric crystals and sinuous arabesques, which reflected apolitical allegory rooted in nineteenth-century architec-tural theory and practice. In The Seven Lamps ofArchitecture (1849) and elsewhere, English critic JohnRuskin had opposed the social consequences of industri-alization by exalting the carved ornament of medieval

churches for its representational naturalism, whichreflected the carvers apprenticeship in imitating theperfection of Gods creation, and its handicraft imperfec-tions, which registered the integration of design andexecution prior to the division of labor. Ruskin had madethis interpretation the basis of an allegory whereinGothic naturalism reflected the political freedom enjoyedwithin Christian humanist society, while the stylizedgeometry of Islamic architecture represented itsantipode: Oriental despotism (Fig. 9).

This allegory provided Bragdon with a way of

engaging the political context of Progressive EraAmerica. The problem of balancing individual libertyagainst collective needs, a permanent dilemma ofdemocratic society, was a particular focus of Progressiveattempts to reform the city and its governance. Architec-tural Recordeditor and New Republic founder HerbertCroly spoke for many reformers when he argued in 1909that a more highly socialized democracy is the onlypractical substitute on the part of convinced democratsfor an excessively individualized democracy.5

Croly and many other progressives saw the socializa-


Herbert Croly, The Promise ofAmerican Life (New York: Macmillan,1909). Bragdon, Projective Ornament, 634.

Fig. A projective ornament pattern basedon the icosahedron, interpreted in threedifferent materials: perforated marble,leaded glass, and brick


8/22

tion of the polity in largely pragmatic terms: as a matterof shifting control over governance from the electoratetoward technocratic commissions, boards, and bureau-cracies. Bragdon, by contrast, saw the socialization ofdemocracy in cultural, subjective, and spiritual terms.For him, it consisted of encouraging citizens to transcendego and merge with the demos or spirit of the people.Bragdons ornament reflected this political goal.Reversing the poles of Ruskins architectural ethic,Bragdon attempted through ornament to socializeunruly individualism and transform industrial capitalistfragmentation into democratic brotherhood. Accord-ingly, the patterns of Bragdons ornament disciplined thefree-growing arabesque to the rigorous objectivity of thegeometric crystal. These designs of curved lines yieldingto geometric frames figured the reconciliation ofindividual will to the demands of social order. Theysymbolized Bragdons application of a dose of Oriental

despotism to a society in which, he felt, Christianhumanism had been co-opted by laissez-faire capitalism(Fig. 10). Bragdon sought to endow his ornament withthe beauty of exquisite acquiescence: individual willyielding to the demands of social necessity.6 Projectiveornament was charged with the rhetorical task ofpersuading willful individuals to yield gracefully to thedemands of social order.

Bragdons term for this graceful yielding was Beauti-ful Necessity. It was a phrase he adopted from RalphWaldo Emersons 1860 essay Fate, an analysis of the

opposition between a materialist discourse of deterministheredity and the notion of individual free will. Fate andfree will, Emerson claimed, are always in tension; theirantinomy defines the parameters of human action.Emerson attempted to harmonize opposing points ofview that he felt emphasized too strongly either thefreedom of individual action from the heritage of thepast or the limitation imposed by genetic and culturalheritage. The main thrust of his essay, however, wasagainst the materialist discourse of social Darwinism.Emerson concluded Fate with a sermonic exhortation

to sacralize the Beautiful Necessity that humanfreedom is not at odds with natural law:

Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity,which secures that all is made of one piece; thatplaintiff and defendant, friend and enemy, animaland planet, food and eater, are of one kindLet us build to the Beautiful Necessitywhichrudely or softly educates [man] to the perceptionthat Law rules throughout existence, a Law whichis not intelligent but intelligence not personal norimpersonal it disdains words and passes under-

119

Fig. The Vine, Free and in Service: oneof Ruskins representations of the contrastbetween freehand naturalism and geomet-ric stylization, which he associated with thesupposed contrast between Christianfreedom and Islamic despotism. JohnRuskin, The Stones of Venice (London,18513)

Fig. In this allegorical drawing, oneof a series depicting the education of thearchitect in Bragdons 1932 treatise TheFrozen Fountain, the architects drawinghand (here allegorized by the knightsstylus/lance) follows a pattern alreadyestablished by the invariant geometric orderof a notionally Islamic garden. See alsothe pattern derived from the 3 x 3 square inthe lower left-hand corner of Fig. 2


9/22

standing; it dissolves persons; it vivifies nature; yetsolicits the pure in heart to draw on all its omnipo-tence.7

In Emersons figure of the Beautiful Necessity,Bragdon saw a harmonious reconciliation of the polaropposition between individual and society that domi-nated Progressive Era politics and culture. WhereasEmersons main objective had been to reassert the powerof human action and thought in the face of a socialdiscourse that used science to legitimize social hierarchy,Bragdons aim was to regulate what he took to be theexcessive individualism of his era by exalting theprinciple of free will yielding to the constraints of anegalitarian social order. The title of Bragdons 1910treatise evoked his assertion that Art is at all timessubject to the Beautiful Necessity of proclaiming theworld order.8 Projective ornament was an altar of thekind Emerson had exhorted his readers to build: it

sacralized the mathematical laws that for Bragdoncharacterized the natural world order. The magic linefigure that graced the dust jacket of the book (a knightstour pattern) gave formal expression to Bragdons ethosof exquisite acquiescence(Fig. 11). Contrasted withthe freehand naturalism of Ruskins nature studies, itemphatically posited that for the twentieth century, atleast study of nature would reveal an impersonal orderto which all things must conform.

Sumptuary regulation

We can recognize in Bragdons concept of BeautifulNecessity a modern instance of the perennial Westernuse of rhetorics of need to regulate desire. Bragdonsethos of exquisite acquiescence, had precursors inclassical, Renaissance, and early modern traditions ofregulating luxury in service of political goals. Within theWestern tradition, sumptuary codes since antiquity haveregulated consumption to maintain particular aspects ofsocial order.9 Sumptuary laws regulate luxury byidentifying some desires as excessive and thus illegiti-mate. In the name of the public good, they regulate

expressions of private desire.Sumptuary determinations of the distinction between

socializing and sociopathic desires have been shaped bybroader discourse about luxury that has drawn andredrawn distinctions between needs and desires. In TheIdea of Luxury, Christopher Berry reviews some of thechanging frameworks within which luxury has beenconceptualized and regulated. The regulation ofconsumption in ancient Rome, he explains, operated inthe name of republican polity: Luxury was a politicalquestion because it signified the presence of the poten-


Fig.

Thedustjacketofthefourth

editionofTheBeautifulNecessity,

publishedbyAlfredA.Knopfin1

939

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays andLectures (New York: Literary Classicsof the United States, 1983), 9678. Claude Bragdon, The BeautifulNecessity (New York: Knopf, 1922), 9. For a survey of Western sumptuaryregulation, see Alan Hunt, Governanceof the Consuming Passions: A History

of Sumptuary Law (New York: St.Martins Press, 1996). Christopher J. Berry, The Idea ofLuxury: A Conceptual and Historical

Investigation (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1994), 63.

In addition to Berry, see DianeOwen Hughes, Sumptuary Law andSocial Relations in Renaissance Italy,in John Bossy (ed.), Disputes andSettlements: Law and Human Rela-

tions in the West (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1983),69100; and Catherine KovesiKillerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy,12001500 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2002). Quoted in Daniel L. Purdy, TheTyranny of Elegance: Consumer

Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Goethe

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 1998), 99. Quoted in Hughes, SumptuaryLaw and Social Relations in Renais-sance Italy, 77.


10/22

tially disruptive power of human desire, a power whichmust be policed.10 Within this republican ethos, desiresstimulated by luxury were seen to subvert good socialorder because they emphasized the pursuit of selfishpleasures that could jeopardize commitment to thepublic good. In Medieval Europe luxury was generallyviewed within a Christian ethics that conflated it withlechery: terms such as the French luxure and the Latinluxuria signified both luxury and sexual lasciviousness.Renaissance attitudes toward luxury revived elements ofthe Roman tradition and commingled them withmedieval Christian views. The Renaissance civic human-ist tradition saw luxury as a corruption of resourcesthat should instead support the independence a citizenneeded to act virtuously in the polis.11

Attitudes toward luxury found expression in sumptu-ary laws that at various times regulated what individualscould wear and eat, what kinds of furnishings they could

possess, and how they could conduct funerals andweddings. The quantitative high point of sumptuary lawoccurred in the absolutist societies of the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries. These regimes greatly increasedthe number and degree of sumptuary distinctions inorder to clarify individuals standing within a minutelygraded prestige economy. Absolutist sumptuary lawssought, in the words of one preamble, to preserve thevisible differences in rank which God and all proprietyrequires, without which also the political harmony andthe commonwealth of continued well-being would no

longer exist12

(Fig. 12).In modernity the political implications of luxury were

redefined in terms more often economic than moral. Thecentralization of political authority that had begununder the princely courts of the sixteenth and seven-teenth centuries continued with the rise of large, imperialnation-states. Mercantilist economists and socialthinkers such as Adam Smith elaborated a politicaleconomy of luxury based on criteria of economic well-being and national prosperity within the context ofglobal trade. The emergent mercantile ethos can be

discerned in the language of sumptuary codes from mar-itime trading cities such as Venice and Genoa beginningas early as the fourteenth century. Preambles to sumptu-ary codes, which frequently attempted to spell out therationale for legislation, began to include managinginvestment among their stated motivations. A Venetianlaw of 1360, for instance, proclaimed, Our state hasbecome less strong because money that should navigateand multiply lies dead, converted into vanities.13

Later mercantile doctrines increasingly assessedluxury consumption within a framework of economic

121

Fig. Clothing as an index to socialposition: depictions of the attire proper toindividuals of different social stations inlate-17th-century Nuremberg


11/22

well-being. Because it stimulated consumption, luxurycould be justified if it promoted a positive balance oftrade, which mercantilists considered to yield positivesocial well-being. In other words, a new discoursereconstituted the distinction between necessity andluxury in terms based on the new political criterion ofnational political economy.

As the transition from caste to class society gainedmomentum, regulation of consumption was liberalizedin parallel with political liberalization. With someexceptions, such as restrictions on drug consumption,modern sumptuary regulation is typically conductedthrough economic incentives. Complex and preciselycalibrated tax codes encourage some kinds of consump-tion and discourage others by assessing them at differentrates.

Necessary luxury

Architectural ornament enjoyed a relative freedom fromthis tradition of legislative regulation. Medieval andRenaissance sumptuary codes typically focused on theornamentation of clothing and on the ways a familyobserved weddings and funerals, occasions that had apublic character in an age of large families acting ina corporate manner within small cities and city-states.Absolutist codes concerned not only dress but also thetrim and decoration of carriages, as well as furnishingsand draperies.14

In ancien rgime society, architectural representation

was regulated less through legal codes than by profes-sional codes such as the doctrine ofconvenance. Conve-nance was a body of principles for ensuring that thedesign of houses conformed to the ranked display ofprestige through which power in court society wasarticulated.15 The classical orders, linked to degrees ofostentation and sumptuousness, marked social distinc-tion within a system of representation based on grada-tions of prestige. Htels particuliers were built anddesigned with the clients particular family or house inmind, and architects made each hotels form and

ornamentation conform to the social status of its occu-pants. This system not only expressed the distinctionbetween those of noble and common birth; it alsoarticulated gradations within the nobility. Nobles of thesword or the robe, of royal or of merely aristocraticrank, the Encyclopdie notes, are figures who, notholding the same rank in society, should have habitationsfitted out so as to mark the superiority or inferiority ofthe different orders of the state16 (Fig. 13). The authorsof the Encyclopdie wrote of aristocratic htels partic-uliers that the character of their decoration requires a


Elias, The Court Society, 63. Jrgen Habermas, The StructuralTransformation of the Public Sphere:

An Inquiry into a Category of Bour-

geois Society, trans. Thomas Burgerand Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge:Polity Press; Cambridge, Mass.: Press, 1989 [1962]), 27. Immanuel Kant, What Is Enlight-enment? (1784), in Kant, Foundationsof the Metaphysics of Morals and What

is Enlightenment?, trans. Lewis WhiteBeck (New York: Bobbs-Merrill,1959), 8592: 87. Roger Chartier, The CulturalOrigins of the French Revolution, trans.Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham andLondon: Duke University Press,1991), 26. Sylvia Lavin, Re Reading theEncyclopedia: Architectural Theoryand the Formation of the Public inLate-Eighteenth-Century France,Journal of the Society of Architectural

Historians, 53:2 (1994): 184 92.

See Johanna B. Moyer, SumptuaryLaw in Ancien Rgime France,12291806(.. dissertation,Syracuse University, 1996). See Norbert Elias, The CourtSociety, trans. Edmund Jephcott (NewYork: Pantheon, 1983 [1969]); WernerSzambien, Symtrie, gout, caractre:Thorie et terminologie de larchitecture

lge classique, 15501800 (Paris:Picard, 1986); and Peter Kohane andMichael Hill, The Eclipse of aCommonplace Idea: Decorum inArchitectural Theory, in ArchitecturalResearch Quarterly, 5:1 (2001): 6377. Quoted in Elias, The Court Society, 59. Quoted in Elias, The Court Society, 58. Max Weber, Wirtschaft undGesellschaft (Tbingen: J. C. B. Mohr,1922), 750; quoted in Elias, The CourtSociety, 38.


12/22

dishware, coaches, furnishings, and other culturaldomains. It was instead a professional ideology, a code ofdecorum formulated by architects and knowledgeableamateurs, such as the Abb Cordemoy, and disseminatedthrough treatises and other written commentaries. In thissense, convenance was a liminal regulatory devicebetween absolutist and republican societies. Although itsprinciple of graduated social representation throughcontrolled magnificence was typical of court society, itsform and mode of operation were characteristic ofpostrevolutionary professional-bourgeois society. Inoperating through the public sphere, using publisheddiscourse as its mode of codification and public opinionas its mode of enforcement, the doctrine ofconvenancereflected the rise of the bourgeois public sphere. It helpedto inaugurate the modern publicity of representationthat Jrgen Habermas has identified as a primary formof political decision-making in liberal societies.

As Habermas argued in his 1962 book The StructuralTransformation of the Public Sphere, liberal modernityis characterized by the emergence of the public sphere as

a middle-class arena for political participation throughdiscussion and debate, conducted in such new institu-tions as salons, cafs, and clubs, as well as newspapersand other print publications. As a domain distinct fromboth the court and the larger populace, the public sphereafforded members of the middle class an arena withinwhich to formulate shared opinion about matters ofcommon concern. In this new realm of private persons

come together as a public, participants status wasbracketed, so opinions were assessed more for theirreasoning than for the prestige of their advocates.20 Inthis way, the bourgeois public sphere provided anautonomous venue for the public use of ones privatereason that Immanuel Kant identified as the primarytechnique of enlightenment.21 The consensus formed bypublic sphere discourse public opinion acquiredauthority as enlightened thought, a category that intheory represented the consensus humanity at largewould reach if it had the means and opportunity for

collective reasoning.22The rise of the public sphere as a domain of ideas

autonomous from social hierarchy contributed to theemergence of new criteria for judging works of art andarchitecture. Among the subjects of debate in salons,coffee houses, and periodicals were paintings, sculptures,and buildings. Architecture criticism, like criticism ofart and literature, represented the application toarchitecture of the new standards of rational evalua-tion.23 Rather than being judged for its consonance withreligious faith or scientific truth, art began to be judged

123

beauty fitting the birth and rank of the persons who havethem built; nevertheless they should never exhibit themagnificence reserved for the palaces of kings.17

The principles ofconvenance remind us that in ancienrgime society luxury consumption was itself a form ofnecessity. Court society was a prestige economy in whichthe display of wealth was a crucial part of maintainingstatus. According to Max Weber, Luxury in the senseof a rejection of the purposive-rational orientation ofconsumption is, to the feudal ruling class, not somethingsuperfluous, but one of the means of its social self-assertion.18 This changed in capitalist modernity, asdecisions of expenditure and investment came to bebased on their impact on capital accumulation. Thebourgeois ethos of economic rationality advocatedkeeping consumption below income level so thatsurpluses could be invested to generate increased futureincome. It stimulated a canon of behavior quite different

from that of the prestige economy of court society, inwhich expenditures for display were considered necessaryeven when they exceeded incomes and so led to financialruin. As Norbert Elias explains, In a society in whichevery outward manifestation of a person has specialsignificance, expenditure on prestige and display is forthe upper classes a necessity which they cannot avoid.19For a society of necessary luxury, architectural ostenta-tion is not superfluous but essential.

Despite its consonance with other forms ofancienrgime sumptuary regulation, convenance was not a legal

code such as those that regulated ornament in dress,

Fig. Ornamental magnificence as anindex of social position: section of the royalaudience chamber at the Palais Royal


13/22

in aesthetic terms that is to say, for its evocation ofdisinterested pleasure in the observer. The disinterestthrough which Kant characterized the emergent practiceof aesthetic judgment was one aspect of the bracketing ofstatus in the bourgeois public sphere. The autonomy ofart its judgment and creation according to independ-ent, internal standards was linked to the political,economic, and moral autonomy of the middle class.

The decline of sumptuary law was part of this processof autonomization. The rise of a new political andeconomic rationality eroded the social importance ofluxury. As capitalist economic rationality becamenormative, prestige expenditure gave way to investmentin productive enterprise.

Architectural modernism emerged out of thisrewriting of the representational contract between archi-tecture and society, in part by creating a new frameworkfor the use of architectural ornament. The beginnings of

modernist reduction of ornament are usually traced tothe shift in French architectural theory from thediscourse ofconvenance to that ofcaractre.24 Some ofthe designs of Ledoux, Boulle, Lequeu, and othersbegan to replace convenance with new modes of represen-tation and communication that reflected the emergentliberal society. Such revolutionary architectureminimized ornament to cultivate such new representa-tional techniques as Ledouxs architecture parlante andBoulles experimental sublimes (Fig. 14). Over thecourse of a century and more, aristocratic and bourgeois

modes of architectural representation competed withone another and with alternative approaches: a projectsuch as Charles Garniers Paris Opera vividly demon-strates the continuing emphasis on magnificence even inbuildings that celebrated the expanding bourgeoisie.Early-twentieth-century modernism can be seen as thehegemony of the values that emerged during the earlierRevolutionary moment. In pursuit of architecturalautonomy, mainstream modernism eliminated orsublimated ornament by treating the building as a workof art to be appreciated in aesthetic terms rather than

read as a sign of its inhabitants social position within acaste society.25

We tend to understand the decline of sumptuary lawand the rise of aesthetic autonomy as a liberatoryprocess. But it would be a mistake to think of theaesthetic as an autonomous zone of freedom fromsumptuary regulation. As the case of Bragdon suggests,modernist architectural discourse developed new ways ofdrawing the distinction between luxury and necessity.It also developed new ways of regulating those practicesit considered luxurious or excessive.


See Marc Grignon and JulianaMaxim, Convenance, Caractre, andthe Public Sphere, Journal of Architec-tural Education, 49:1 (September1995), 2937. See Michael Osman et al. (eds.),Perspecta 33: Mining Autonomy

(Cambridge, Mass.: Press, 2002),especially the essays by HubertDamisch and Anthony Vidler. Nancy Fraser, Rethinking thePublic Sphere: A Contribution to theCritique of Actually Existing Democ-racy,in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Haber-mas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge,Mass.: Press, 1992); reprinted inBruce Robbins (ed.), The PhantomPublic Sphere (Minneapolis: Univer-sity of Minnesota Press, 1993), 132: 7.

Lavin, Re Reading the Encyclo-pedia,185. See Thorstein Veblen, The Theoryof the Leisure Class: An Economic

Study in the Evolution of Institutions

(New York: Macmillan, 1899). Eliasnotes that the sumptuary practicesVeblen described as conspicuousconsumption are distinct from thoseof court society. Conspicuous con-sumption describes ostentation thatexpresses an ethos of wealth, whereasthe ostentation of court society isbound up in an ethos of caste and is amore central technique of power.


14/22

Extensions and critiques of Habermas account ofthe public sphere have suggested that the bourgeoispublic sphere was not only a liberalizing counterweightto absolutist authority, but also a technique of exclusionthat exercised new forms of control over public discourse.Scholars such as Joan Landes, Mary Ryan, and NancyFraser have argued that the bourgeois public sphere wasconstituted by exclusions based on gender, class, andother social criteria. It was always in competition with arange of counterpublics formed by different con-stituencies and operating through varied styles ofpolitical behavior and norms of public speech. As Fraserputs it, the bourgeois public was never the public.26By recognizing only certain forms of discourse, thenormative public sphere limited participation to thoseeducated in those kinds of literacy; by recognizing onlycertain contexts for debate, it limited the impact of thoseexcluded from those domains based on sex, race, or

class. Even a principle such as that of bracketing statusto diminish irrational authority differentials couldfunction repressively, by excluding some styles ofcomportment and discourse. In this view, the publicsphere analyzed by Habermas bourgeois, masculinist,and highly literate was a way for a segment of themiddle class to contain the authority of these otherpublics.

The hegemonic dimension of the bourgeois publicsphere identified by Fraser and others can be discernedalso within architectural discourse. Sylvia Lavin suggests

that as Enlightenment architectural theory began to

focus on providing the means for normalizing andcodifying individual aesthetic response and for envisag-ing the production of a coherent body of public opinionon matters hitherto considered to be largely subjectiveit created an aesthetic discourse through which tastewas regulated.27

This recognition helps to make sense of modernistapproaches to architectural ornament. Around the turnof the twentieth century, new rhetorics of necessityemerged to discipline consumption and expression byregulating ornament. Bragdons development anddiscussion of projective ornament is a case in point.Bragdon approached ornament as a terrain of negotia-tion of the relation between luxury and necessity, privatedesire and public good. His decision to focus onornament was strategic: ornament was a terrain in flux.The bourgeois productivist ethos was eroding itsrationale, yet ornament persisted as a site where

capitalist class distinctions were articulated throughthe new practice of conspicuous consumption.28 In thehope of eliminating this site of invidious distinction,Bragdon made ornament the site for deployment of anew necessity. With projective ornament, Bragdoncreated something paradoxical within the traditionaltheory ofconvenance: a universal ornament suitable to allclasses and building types. Yet in its antagonism toluxury and ostentation, projective ornament reassertedthe tradition of sumptuary regulation now in theservice of bourgeois and egalitarian rather than aristo-

cratic ends.

Middle-class decorum

Bragdons approach represents a minority positionwithin early-twentieth-century modernism. Projectiveornament never acquired the universal currency forwhich it was intended. Yet Bragdons alternativemodernism yields insights into mainstream modernism.If we compare Bragdons ornament reform to thoseof Hermann Muthesius and Adolf Loos, for instance, wecan see that even radically divergent approaches to

ornament shared the basic aim of sumptuary law: toregulate expression in the name of social order.

German architect, writer, and government ministerMuthesius (18611927) shaped modernist thinkingin German-speaking countries through publications inwhich he advocated the practical informality ofnineteenth-century English and Scottish houses as amodel for the renewal of twentieth-century Germanbuilding practice (Fig. 15). In his 1902 treatise Style-Architecture and Building-Art, Muthesius railed againstthe aristocratic pretensions of the German middle class,

125

Fig. Autonomous architecture:Ledouxs Shelter for the Rural Guardsproject for the ideal city of Chaux, 1771


15/22

which produced a sham culture manifest especiallyin the taste for rich ornament. Muthesius characterized

the modern lack of decoration as a quintessentiallyburgerlich trait, part of the middle-class rejection ofaristocratic pomp and need for representation.29

Muthesius associated extravagance in architecturaldecoration with other kinds of excess. In a section onDress and Dwellinghe emphasized the bourgeois basisof nineteenth-century transformations toward simplic-ity and unconditional functionality.Todays clothing,Muthesius proclaimed, is the same for all the classes ofsociety: its singular characteristic is that it defines inevery respect the middle-class ideal, whereas in theeighteenth century the particular customs, way of life,and clothing of the highest class set the standard.30The turn-of-the-century unornamented dress andtopcoat was the epitome of modernity because itexemplified the tendency toward the strict matter-of-

fact, in the elimination of every merely applied decora-tive form, and in shaping each form according todemands set by purpose.31 Muthesius discerned thesame tendency in dwellings, where reforms strive toincrease the amount of light and air, to design strictlyfunctional rooms, to avoid all useless appendages in thedecoration, to eliminate heavy, unmovable householdfurnishings, and to strive for an overall sense of bright-ness and impression of cleanliness. These reforms,Muthesius asserted, follow the same tendency as ourclothing, the closer dwelling that envelops us.32 In both

cases, the necessity of representation within thecourtly prestige economy had been replaced by afunctionalist necessity.

Like Muthesius, Moravian-born Viennese architectLoos (18701933) criticized as philistine sham thearistocratic pretensions of his middle-class compatriots,particularly in his 1898 series of weekly reviews of theVienna Jubilee Exposition in the Neue Freie Presse,subsequently gathered into the 1921 collection Spokeninto the Void. Like both Muthesius and Bragdon, Looswrote in service of a social reform project pursued

through cultural revitalization. Looss work was aconcerted campaign to strip the ornament fromlanguage, from dress, and from dwelling. Instead, headvocated correct form, solid materials, preciseexecution33 (Fig. 16). His essay Mens Fashioncharacterized good taste in mens clothing in a way thatanticipated Muthesiuss conflation of functional utilitywith good taste. Loos opened his essay with a reviewof the modern liberalization of sumptuary regulation:Our century has done away with dress code regulations.Everyone now enjoys the right to dress as he pleases,


Hermann Muthesius, Style-Architecture and Building-Art: Trans-

formations of Architecture in the

Nineteenth Century and Its Present

Condition, introd. and trans. StanfordAnderson (Santa Monica: GettyCenter for the History of Art and theHumanities, 1994 [1902; rev. 1903]),53. Muthesius, Style-Architecture andBuilding-Art, 79. Muthesius, Style-Architecture andBuilding-Art, 79. Muthesius, Style-Architecture andBuilding-Art, 79.

Adolf Loos, Spoken into the Void:Collected Essays 18971900, trans.Jane O. Newman and John H. Smith(Cambridge, Mass.: Press, 1982[1921, rev. 1931]), 9. Loos, Spoken into the Void, 11. Loos, Spoken into the Void, 14. Adolf Loos, Ornament andCrime (1908), in Ulrich Conrads(ed.), Programs and Manifestoes on20th-Century Architecture, trans.Michael Bullock (Cambridge, Mass.: Press, 1970 [1964]), 1924.

Massimo Cacciari has argued thatLoos was less an agent of capitalistrationalization than its most profoundcritic: the disjunctive synthesis of hishouses proclaimed the impossibility ofdwelling in fragmented, disenchantedmodernity and so developed a radicalcritique of modern rationalization. SeeMassimo Cacciari, Architecture andNihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern

Architecture, trans. Stephen Sartarelli(New Haven: Yale University Press,1993). While I admire the subtlety andeloquence of Cacciaris interpretation,it seems to me that Looss criticism of

modernity coexisted with a ferventembrace of rationalization. If theabsence of ornament from Loossinteriors and exteriors signified hisrejection of the false synthesisimposed by Secession members, it alsoproclaimed his positive affirmation ofthe bourgeois productivist ethos ofrenunciation and rationalization.Looss strenuous advocacy of modern-ization in his journalism is among themost impassioned modernist expres-sions of the professional-bourgeoisethos of rationality. Likewise, it ispossible to read Looss sartorial stanceas an instance of the defensive use offashion as a veil and a protection foreverything spiritual and now all themore free, in the words of GeorgSimmel (Simmel, Fashion, Interna-tional Quarterly, 10, trans. unknown[New York: 1904], reprinted in DonaldN. Levine [ed.], Georg Simmel onIndividuality and Social Forms

[Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1971], 294323: 312). Yet even if weread Looss middle-class masculinefashion ideal as a mask that protectshis soul from metropolitan depreda-tions, it is also true that he advocatedthat fashion ideal as a repressivediscipline vis--vis Secessionistaesthetic dress.


16/22

even like the king if he wants.34 The trouble, he went onto say, was that too many Germans and especiallyAustrians took advantage of that freedom by adoptingdistinctive, aristocratic, artisticclothing styles. Looshad nothing but disdain for these dandies and theiroutfits: double-breasted waistcoats and checked suitswith velvet collars! a jacket with blue velvet cuffs!35

Loos took such extravagances of personality inclothing as markers of an evolutionary lag. He associatedthem with the financially reckless expenditures of courtlyprestige economy. This was a more pressing issue inVienna, where the Habsburgs still held court in theBaroque splendor of the Hofburg, than in more metro-politan cities such as London or New York, where theethos of investing capital for productive return had morefully taken root. Loos also saw artistic garments asbreaches of sexual decorum, public eruptions ofa sensuality that had to be kept private had to be

bracketed in order to sustain the rational exchanges ofliberal bourgeois society. He applied a similar logic toarchitecture, identifying cultural advancement with theelimination of decoration from objects of everyday use,among which he included buildings.

The continuity between Looss militation againstarchitectural ornament and older traditions of regulatingornament to maintain social order is especially clearwhen we set Looss attitude toward architecturalornament in the context of his broader lifestyle princi-ples. His criticisms of ornamental cookery (I eat roast

beef) and of ornamentation in clothing (Anyone whogoes around in a velvet coat today is not an artist but abuffoon or a house painter) established a continuumbetween his views on ornament in architecture and inother domains of culture.36 The common basis of theseviews was the conviction that ornament was wastedlabor-power: hours of human labor spent ornamentingclothing and buildings should rationally have beendirected toward modernizing Austro-Hungarian society.The investment of time and money in ornament, like thecontinuing rule of the Habsburg family over the Austro-

Hungarian empire, was for Loos a vestige of prestigeeconomy inhibiting a modernization that was already faradvanced elsewhere, particularly England and the UnitedStates. Looss hostility to ornament stemmed from hisapplication to Austrian society of an analysis based onthe productivist ethos of capitalist modernity.37

The terms in which modernists such as Muthesius andLoos sought to regulate ornament suggest that architec-tural modernism reflected not the decline of sumptuaryregulation but its reformulation in liberal terms.Modernism revived the regulatory role of ornament, but

127

Fig. A minimally ornamented Scottishhouse exterior advanced by Muthesius as amodel of middle-class decorum

Fig. The minimally ornamented exteriorof Looss Mller House (Prague, 1930)


17/22

in the service of bourgeois ideals such as functionality,universality, and economic productivity. At the sametime, modernism developed new modes of codificationand enforcement: while earlier sumptuary regulation hadoperated through legislation, in modernity a proliferat-ing discourse about ornament instead mobilized publicopinion as a regulatory device.

Aesthetic discipline

We can understand the reformatting of sumptuaryregulation exemplified by Loos, Muthesius, and Bragdonas an example of the rise of the disciplinary modality ofpower that Michel Foucault argued characterizes liberalmodernity. In his studies of medicine, penology, andsexuality, Foucault contended that in liberal societiespower was generally not centralized, as it had been undermonarchical sovereignty, but dispersed across the wholeof society. New practices such as individuated incarcera-

tion, clinical medicine, nationalized schooling, andmilitary drilling implemented a set of disciplines thatdrew individuals into their own self-regulation. Bytraining bodies and minds in particular ways, moderninstitutions instilled in their subjects a discipline that ledthem to conform voluntarily to social imperatives.38

In this analysis, the separation of public and privateidentified by Habermas as a constitutive dimension ofliberal modernity did not create a domain of autonomywherein subjects were free from regulation. Instead, thatseparation extended the reach of power into more areas

of life through new techniques of social control. Theliberal ethic of personal freedom emerged in tandem withnewly internalized modes of regulation. As DavidHalperin puts it, liberal power, far from enslaving itsobjects, constructs them as subjective agents andpreserves them in their autonomy, so as to invest them allthe more completely The state can safely leave [itssubjects] to make their own choices in the allegedlysacrosanct private sphere of personal freedom whichthey now inhabit, because within that sphere theyfreelyand spontaneously police both their own conduct and the

conduct of others.39Foucaults argument that power in liberal modernity

is dispersed across the whole social field throughpractices of self-regulation is corroborated in the case ofsumptuary regulation by historians such as Alan Hunt.In his history of sumptuary regulation, Hunt claims thatmodernity has been characterized by a general expan-sion of discipline and surveillancethat has suffused theprivate sphere with more indirect forms of sumptuaryregulation.40 Now spread across a range of both publicand private forms of governance, sumptuary regulation


See Michel Foucault, Discipline andPunish: The Birth of the Prison, trans.Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon,1978 [1975]), especially part 3, Disci-pline, 135228. See also Foucault, TheSubject and Power,in Hubert L.Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, MichelFoucault: Beyond Structuralism and

Hermeneutics, 2nd edn. (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1983),20826; and Foucault, The History ofSexuality, : An Introduction, trans.Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon,1978 [1976]). David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault:Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1995), 19. Hunt, Governance of the ConsumingPassions, 378ff. Purdy, The Tyranny of Elegance,91. Purdy, The Tyranny of Elegance, 217. Purdy, The Tyranny of Elegance, 117. Purdy, The Tyranny of Elegance, 193.


18/22

operates through dispersed forms of pressure, from

workplace dress policies and grooming codes to practices

of self-governance shaped by broadly shared social

expectations about proper dress and demeanor.

Daniel Purdy has further developed this Foucauldian

analysis of modern sumptuary regulation in The Tyranny

of Elegance, his study of the rise of fashion discourse in

German-language magazines during the last decades of

the eighteenth century. Purdy argues that social consen-

sus on taste operated as a form of discipline working

through the diffuse mechanisms of public opinion about

what constituted good taste in clothing.41 The new

middle-class fashion discourse taught consumers to

judge sartorial detail according to functional rather than

representational criteria. The use of clothes as signs of

identity within court society was replaced by a use of

clothes as part of an economic and political calculus of

production,42 expressed through an aesthetic of

sartorial understatement43

that minimized ornament.Under the new productivist dispensation, the primary

message of clothes was the absence of any message not

justified by necessity.44 Restraint in dress signified

willing espousal of the modern ethos of fiscal restraint

and reinvestment of surpluses in productive enterprise.

The seemingly autonomous aesthetic attitude toward

clothing was a form of middle-class discipline (Fig. 17).

Purdys interpretation is a useful key to reading the

attitudes of Loos and Muthesius toward clothing and

also toward architecture. Loos recurrently linked

rejection of ornament in dress and decoration to the riseof aesthetic judgment. Asserting bourgeois values in a

society still dominated by the court and its prestige

economy, Loos insisted that the aesthetic attitude toward

clothing, furniture, food, and architecture was the

attitude appropriate to modern middle-class society.

Absence of ornament has brought the other arts to un-

suspected heights, he claimed in Ornament and Crime

(1908), describing aesthetic perception as the sublima-

tion of sensuous pleasures that in less modern societies

had been gratified by ornament. These views constructed

close links between economic rationalization andaesthetic appreciation. The elimination of ornament,

Loos suggested, would advance modernization both

directly, by redirecting capital from investment in display

to investment in production, and indirectly, by dissemi-

nating the aesthetic attitude toward works of art that

supported such a redirection of investment. Looss

sartorial ethos is a quintessential modernist expression

of the aesthetic discipline that Purdy reconstructs.

[W]hat does it mean to be dressed well?Loos asked.

[It] is a question of being dressed in such a way that one

129

Fig. Bourgeois and aristocratic modes

of representation in clothing, as depicted by

Bruno Paul in his drawing A Conflict of

Fashion, published in Simplicissimus

in 1902. Reproduced from Adolf Loos,

Spoken into the Void


19/22

stands out the least. In good society, to be conspicuous

is bad manners.45 For Loos, the acme of good society

was to be found in London, where the black business suit

was a kind of middle-class uniform, one of the bracket-

ing devices sustaining public sphere discourse (Figs. 18

and 19).

The relation between elimination of ornament and

the formation of the modern middle-class individual as

an autonomous agent of aesthetic judgment is especially

clear in Muthesiuss text, which establishes strictparameters for the free exercise of judgment. Muthe-

sius claimed:

The wind that today blows across our culture is

middle class, just as today we all work, just as

everyones clothing is middle class, just as our new

tectonic forms move in the track of complete

simplicity and straightforwardness, so also we

want to live in middle-class rooms whose essence

and goal is simplicity and straightforwardness.

No limits are set to good taste within these forms

of straightforwardness; indeed here it can beengaged more genuinely than in the worn out,

ostentatious cramming of our houses today.46

Muthesiuss rhetoric confirms that modernist sublima-

tion of ornament constructed aesthetic judgment as a

disciplinary technique.

As with Loos and Muthesius, Bragdons ornament

reform was part of a broader lifestyle reform. Bragdon

advocated and followed such new lifestyle practices as

vegetarianism, yoga, meditation, and renunciation of

alcohol and tobacco. His ornamental designs and his


Loos, Spoken into the Void, 12.

Muthesius, Style-Architecture and

Building-Art, 94.

See Muthesius, Style-Architecture

and Building-Art, 99; and Loos,

Ornament and Crime.

Fig. (left) Uniforms, compulsory and

voluntary, from Goldman & Salatsch

advertisements printed in Looss journal

Das Andere

Fig. (right) Differential modernization

expressed in middle-class clothing: a

drawing by Thomas Theodor Heine,

captioned Herr and Frau Schmidt look

like this when they travel to London and

like this when they return after a week there

as Mr. and Mrs. Smith, published in

Simplicissimus in 1902. Reproduced fromAdolf Loos, Spoken into the Void


20/22

renderings of the use of projective ornament featured

selected signifiers of luxury remotivated to mark a new

hierarchy: the spiritual hierarchy of dedication to

Theosophy and its universalist and objectivist ideals.

Projective ornament, intended to become a universal

ornament for spiritual democracy, in the short term

distinguished adepts within the new regime of Theosoph-

ical faith and spiritual democracy. Bragdon articulated

his commitment to the rule of the demos and his

Theosophical faith in the existence of an inflexible higher

ruling power through figures of authority drawn from

caste societies: in his renderings, spiritual adepts are

often distinguished by the trappings of aristocratic or

priestly authority (Figs. 20 and 21).

Bragdons use of attributes of royal and priestly

luxury, like his emphasis on ornament generally, is an

instance of sumptuousness deployed in the service of

sumptuary goals. It echoes the Renaissance espousal of

civically endorsed splendor (such as official robes), atradition that Bragdon mobilized against the use of

splendor for purposes of conspicuous consumption. The

emphasis on ornament and other marks of distinction in

Bragdons work signals his desire for a society based on a

hierarchy of spiritual progress toward transcendence of

self, rather than on distinctions of nationality, class, or

culture. Bragdons use of markers of luxury to signify

spiritual advancement inverts the sumptuary codes of

Loos and Muthesius. For them, the uniform of bourgeois

dress and deportment or conduct signified membership

in a middle-class aristocracy of good taste.47 WhereasLoos and Muthesius constructed a productivist disci-

pline through sublimation of ornament, Bragdon

developed an idealist, counter-productivist discipline to

which ornament, as something that answered to a

higher necessity than those of function and economy,

was central.

Modernist convenance

In the trajectory of architectural modernism after the

First World War, Bragdons approach to social regula-

tion through ornament lost out to a mainstream stancederived from the ideas of Muthesius and Loos. A

productivist necessity became hegemonic within

architectural approaches to ornament, much as the

bourgeois public sphere acquired hegemony over other

modes of publicity.

More important than these discrepant outcomes,

though, is the fact that the very different projects of

Bragdon, Muthesius, and Loos exemplify a single mode

of discursive regulation. Despite their diverging

approaches to ornament, all three shared the premise

131

Fig. (above) One of Bragdons render-

ings showing potential applications of

projective ornament

Fig. (below) The Audience Chamber,

a rendering possibly of a design for the

stage from Bragdons 1918 book

Architecture and Democracy (New York:

Knopf, 1918), 111


21/22

that regulating ornament was a way of regulating

individual expression in the name of social order. For all

three of these men, ornament was a means of disciplining

expression and consumption a site of what we might

call bourgeois convenance. In light of this analysis, it

seems significant that Bragdon, Muthesius, and Loos

were not only architects, but also journalists. They used

the discursive public sphere to mold opinion on ornament

and decorum, consumption practices, and ways of life.

The liberal regime of social control through public

opinion and self-regulation is useful in describing not

only the new meaning of clothing in bourgeois modernity,

but also the new framework for the understanding and

practice of architectural ornament. The modern recoding

of sumptuary law from prohibitions on display to tax-

code incentives did not mean that the regulation of

display declined. Architectural ornament, like clothing


Regarding the modernist white

wall as an aesthetic sublimation of

ornament, see Mark Wigley, White

Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashion-

ing of Modern Architecture (Cam-

bridge, Mass.: Press, 1995).

Marc Grignon and Juliana

Maxim, Convenance, Caractre, and

the Public Sphere.


22/22

and domestic furnishings, shifted from reflecting an

economy of symbolic prestige to reflecting an economy

of productive labor. Regulation of ornament took on

a more pervasively negative character, and it moved from

a specifically legislative to a more generally discursive

arena, operating through the rule not of law but of public

opinion. Sumptuary regulation moved from legislative

codes to the more diffuse codes of middle-class deport-

ment and professional ideology.

We tend to think of the aesthetic, and of auto-

nomous architecture, as the liberation of art from its

subservience to religious and political orders. But it

is worth remembering that the aesthetic of artistic

autonomy served the particular sociopolitical order of

bourgeois modernity. Modernist autonomous architec-

ture served social and political ends inasmuch as it was

destined for aesthetic appreciation. The formation of an

autonomous architecture predicated on aesthetic

appreciation entailed the deployment of a new discipline

that mobilized the dispersed and diffuse power of public

opinion to re-regulate consumption and expression.

Black suits and white walls can both operate as repres-

sive bracketing techniques.48

Marc Grignon and Juliana Maxim have characterized

the highly articulated doctrine ofconvenance as an

attempt to stabilize the representation of status in a

period of transition from caste to class society.49 If we

focus on the mechanism more than the content of

sumptuary regulation, however, we may come to see the

doctrine ofconvenance as not just as the final product

of the classical system, but also the beginning of modern

discursive regulation. Convenance was not only crepus-

cular, as Grignon and Maxim judiciously observe, but

also auroral.

133

AcknowledgementI am grateful to Lauren Kogod for

commenting on the essay and sharing her

expertise on Muthesius.

Massey New Necessities Perspecta 35 2004

Documents

Transcript of Massey New Necessities Perspecta 35 2004