Jonathan Massey
Fig. Claude Bragdon, photographed in 1897
For an overview of Bragdon’s career,
see Blake McKelvey, “Claude F.
Bragdon, Architect, Stage Designer,
and Mystic,” Rochester History, 29:4
(October 1967), 1–20.
New Necessities
Architectural ornament played a key role in the representation of power within sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
court societies. Ornamental magnificence displayed the
position of its bearer along a scale that ran from
commoner to king. In absolutist France, this representational system was codified through the architectural
doctrine of convenance, usually translated as “appropriateness” or decorum. Treatise writers such as Philibert de
l’Orme, 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 client’s status. The design code of convenance was one
of many ways that aristocratic society regulated selfpresentation. Informal behavioral codes were buttressed
by legislative codes: sumptuary laws regulated ornamentation in dress, dishware, coaches, and domestic furnishings such as cabinets and draperies.
Architectural modernism emerged from the breakdown of this doctrine of convenance. Beginning with
eighteenth-century “revolutionary architects” such as
Etienne-Louis Boullée and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, new
criteria such as utility, convenience, economy, and
functional expressiveness began to displace the representation of social status through gradations of magnificence. 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 régime 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.
Modernist Aesthetic Discipline
It is customary to understand this transformation as
a process of autonomization wherein architecture sought
out laws of expression internal to the discipline rather
than given by social and political structure. Such an
interpretation misrecognizes the nature of power in
liberal modernity, however. This essay draws on the work
of Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault to suggest that
architectural modernism did not so much make architecture independent of social structure as develop new
techniques of regulation appropriate to liberal society.
Through a case study of the system of “projective
ornament” developed in 1915 by American architect
Claude Bragdon, it argues that early-twentieth-century
modernisms reconstituted convenance based on new
social ideals and modalities of power. Bragdon’s
modernist ornament aimed to persuade individuals to
conform voluntarily to practices in line with what
Bragdon saw as social necessities. An examination of his
use of a sumptuary rhetoric to regulate architectural
ornament reveals parallels to the strategies that more
influential modernists such as Hermann Muthesius and
Adolf Loos used to eliminate or sublimate ornament.
Examining these stances toward ornament as instances
of sumptuary regulation suggests that modernist
architectural discourse reflects both the rise of the public
sphere as an arena of political deliberation and the
operation of the modality of power that Foucault
characterized as “discipline.”
Projective ornament
Claude Bragdon (1866 –1946: Fig. 1) was a Rochester,
New York, architect and critic who contributed to the
development of modernism by developing a distinctive
mode of progressive architecture.1 Bragdon’s career
113
spanned many fields, from architecture and theater
design to writing, publishing, and the graphic arts. In the
1890s, after apprenticeships with the Buffalo firm Green
and Wicks and New York architect Bruce Price, Bragdon
opened a practice in Rochester, where he was active in
Arts and Crafts circles. His designs for posters and
magazine covers distinguished him as a graphic artist,
and his journalism soon gained him a reputation as one
of America’s foremost architecture critics. As a supportive critic, then as editor of the republished Kindergarten
Chats, he was a leading interpreter of Louis Sullivan to
professional and general audiences from the turn of the
century into the 1930s. Bragdon developed professional
and personal ties not only to Sullivan, but also to Frank
Lloyd Wright, Ralph Adams Cram, Bertram Goodhue,
Irving K. Pond, and Lewis Mumford. As one of
Rochester’s leading architects, he built many houses and
significant public buildings, including police stations, a
, a Chamber of Commerce, and a new terminal for
the New York Central Rail Road. At the end of World
War I, Bragdon closed his architectural practice to
pursue writing and stage design. Moving to New York,
he established himself as a practitioner of the modernist
staging technique known as the New Stagecraft.
Bragdon’s theater work extended into the 1930s, and his
writing continued up to his death in 1946. His major
books on architecture are The Beautiful Necessity (1910),
Projective Ornament (1915), Architecture and Democracy
(1918), and The Frozen Fountain (1932). In addition to
these, Bragdon published many books and articles on
mysticism, Theosophy, the new woman, and the fourth
dimension of space.
Beyond advocating modernism in his architectural
criticism, magazine pieces, and books, Bragdon created
114
Massey —New Necessities
Bragdon’s system of ornament is
presented in Claude Bragdon, Projective Ornament (Rochester: Manas
Press, 1915). For a detailed examination of projective ornament, see
Jonathan Massey, “Architecture and
Involution: Claude Bragdon’s Projective Ornament 1915–1946” (..
dissertation, Princeton University,
2001).
Riemann’s June 10, 1854 lecture
“Über die Hypothesen, welche der
Geometrie zu Grunde liegen,” which
first presented his theory of n-dimensional space, was published in Abhandlungen der Königlichen Gesellschaft der
Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, 13
(1868). It appeared in an English
translation by William Kingdon
Clifford as “On the Hypotheses which
Lie at the Bases of Geometry,” Nature,
8 (1873), 14–17, 36 –7. For an overview
of changing theorizations of space, see
Max Jammer, Concepts of Space: The
History of Theories of Space in
Physics, 3rd edn. (New York: Dover,
1994).
The best account of the discourse
of the fourth dimension of space and
its significance for modern art is Linda
Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth
Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1983;
forthcoming in an expanded second
edition).
in 1915 a modernist ornamental canon he called
“projective ornament”2 (Figs. 2 and 3). He developed
projective ornament as a comprehensive response to
modernity, a “new generalization” reflecting developments in science (theorization of n-dimensional space);
technology (exploitation of invisible wavelengths for
representation and communication); and society (the
vastly enlarged scale of social organization in an
expanding industrial economy). By folding these and
other factors into his system of ornament, Bragdon
sought to create a single ornamental language suitable to
the full range of modern programs and contexts.
Bragdon based projective ornament on his conviction
that the key to modernity lay in recognition of the fourth
dimension of space. One of the great accomplishments of
nineteenth-century mathematics had been G. B. F.
Riemann’s 1854 reconceptualization of space as a
manifold that could possess a variable and potentially
infinite number of dimensions.3 Riemann’s theorization
of n-dimensional space challenged the authority of
Euclidean geometry and laid the groundwork for the
later discoveries of Hermann Minkowski and Albert
Einstein. At the same time, his work inspired a large
parascientific literature that posited a fourth spatial
115
dimension as the explanation for occult phenomena and
mystical experiences. Popularized as a discourse of the
fourth dimension of space, Riemann’s discovery became
a vehicle for social critiques and spiritual visions,
including those of Theosophy, the “spiritual science” that
had emerged in the 1870s as one of the many new
religions of the era.4
Bragdon was a leading American advocate of
Theosophy, and he based his approach to virtually every
issue on Theosophical doctrine, even if he frequently
reinterpreted it creatively to engage other thought
systems and cultural domains. During the 1910s and
1920s, he promulgated a spiritualized conception of the
fourth dimension that echoed nineteenth-century
Protestant visions of the City of God. Building on Theosophical doctrine, he claimed that the fourth dimension
was a physically real space within which humanity would
realize millennial dreams of harmony and transcendence.
Bragdon created projective ornament in large part to
disseminate this “higher space theory.” Many of his
techniques for generating projective ornament patterns
consisted of projections and “unfoldings” of fourdimensional geometries —ways of translating them into
more familiar three- and two-dimensional spaces.
By introducing viewers to Bragdon’s spiritualized
concept of “higher space,” projective ornament would
advance humanity toward its transcendent future.
Projective ornament combined three kinds of
patterns. One was based on what Bragdon called “magic
lines in magic squares.” These are the lines created by
tracing in ascending numerical order the numbers in a
“magic square,” an arrangement of sequential numbers
into a square, each column, row, and diagonal of which
sums to the same number. Tracing the “magic lines” of
different magic squares, Bragdon created patterns he
then used as templates for ornamental figures and
decorative fields (Fig. 4). A second basis for the patterns
of projective ornament was graphic projection of the
Platonic solids. Bragdon produced two-dimensional
projections of these three-dimensional solids in two
ways: by “unfolding” them onto a plane, much as one
might flatten a cardboard box by cutting it at certain
vertices and unfolding it; and through axonometric
projection (Fig. 5). The third basis for the patterns of
Bragdon’s system of ornament was an extrapolation of
the second: simulated axonometric projections of
“hypersolids,” the four-dimensional correlatives to the
Platonic solids. Four-dimensional “polyhedroids” such as
Fig. (left) Claude Bragdon’s projective
ornament designs
Fig. (center) Projective ornament
patterns applied to interior paneling, trim,
and textiles
Fig. (right) One of Bragdon’s explanations of the process for generating magic
lines from magic squares, framed by
a projective ornament pattern based on
magic lines
Massey —New Necessities
Fig. (left) Three-dimensional polyhedrons, projected and unfolded into two
dimensions
Fig. (center) Selected four-dimensional
polyhedroids, projected into two dimensions and translated into ornament
Fig. (right) Projections and magic lines
translated into ornament through selective
manipulation, repetition, and filling
116
the tesseract, the four-dimensional extrapolation of the
cube, could be described mathematically and geometrically, but they could not be built or seen. To make these
sublime shapes visible, after a fashion, Bragdon followed
conventions of mathematical representation and
extrapolated from conventional axonometric projection.
He projected the additional dimension along a fourth
axis, thereby representing the “fourth perpendicular”—
the hypothetical direction in which four-dimensional
spatial extension was to be found. This technique
generated graphic figures that simulated axonometric
views of four-dimensional hypersolids (Fig. 6).
By selectively accentuating and repeating elements
of these different patterns and projections, Bragdon
turned them into ornament (Fig. 7). He hoped that
exposure to projective ornament would habituate viewers
to 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, to
the four-dimensional space of democratic and Theosophical communion. This dimensional sequence
reflected Bragdon’s familiarity with Plato’s cave allegory.
Projective ornament was intended to help people
confined to the “cave” of three-dimensional space —
117
prisoners of phenomenality —recognize their deception
and break out into the lightful realm of ideas: the fourth
dimension.
Within this mystical framework, projective ornament
addressed the more mundane problems of Progressive
Era American society. One of Bragdon’s primary aims in
creating a universal ornament was to integrate a society
divided by distinctions of class, language, and national
origin. Discomfited by the class antagonisms of industrial
society, Bragdon criticized liberal modernity for being
excessively individualistic and materialistic. He took
these distinctions to jeopardize social coherence and
democratic political traditions. In response, he enlisted
architecture in the construction of a common culture.
Approaching architectural progressivism in communicative terms, Bragdon envisioned projective ornament as a
universal architectural “form-language” to replace the
ornament of the historical architectural styles. In its
project of simplifying and abstracting ornament to
broaden its intelligibility, projective ornament was an
architectural analogue to language reforms such as Basic
English, Simplified Spelling, and Esperanto. Universal
ornament would turn architecture from a technique of
differentiation and distinction into one of integration.
Abstraction played a fundamental role in Bragdon’s
architectural reform project. Ornament marked stylistic
difference by deploying a specialized vocabulary of
forms associated with a particular period and place, and
often by representing regionally specific foliage. By
abstracting ornament into geometric patterns and regular
arabesques, Bragdon sought to make it universally
legible, requiring neither special linguistic competency
nor culturally particular knowledge. He resorted to
geometry not only to visualize dimensional sequences
but also because, as a formal manifestation of mathematics, it was universally intelligible to human reason.
The geometric basis of projective ornament also
marked Bragdon’s search for an impersonal mode of
architectural expression. The individualism of his
mentor Sullivan and rival Wright struck Bragdon as a
misguided expression of the individualist ethos of liberal
modernity. Bragdon saw the rigorous objectivity of
geometric form as a more suitable basis than individual
virtú for an egalitarian and assimilationist architectural
mode. Geometry and regularity provided design
strategies that were “objective” rather than “subjective.”
Bragdon developed techniques to express this “objectivity” in graphic terms: crisp black-and-white linework
Massey —New Necessities
Fig. A projective ornament pattern based
on the icosahedron, interpreted in three
different materials: perforated marble,
leaded glass, and brick
Herbert Croly, The Promise of
American Life (New York: Macmillan,
1909).
Bragdon, Projective Ornament, 63–4.
118
gave his drawings an impersonal cast. The linear forms of
projective ornament could be translated into building
materials such as brick, tile, and textile without the
personalizing effect of handicraft (Fig. 8).
Bragdon’s impersonal universalism was based on his
sense that industrial capitalism was at odds with the
realization of democratic social ideals. The specialization
and differentiation at the core of industrial process
seemed antithetical to democratic egalitarianism, as well
as to the viability of the shared public discourse necessary for deliberative self-government. But Bragdon’s
universalism also manifested his commitment to
Theosophy. By fusing the cosmology of ancient Eastern
sacred texts such as the Upanishads and the BhagavadGita with the discoveries of modern Western science,
Theosophy proposed to reintegrate science with religion
and create a worldwide “brotherhood of man.” The
impersonality and universalism of projective ornament
reflected Bragdon’s Theosophical convictions.
Projective ornament reflected on the problem of
consensus in democratic society by constructing an
allegory of voluntary conformity. Bragdon’s ornamental
designs were structured by the tension between geometric crystals and sinuous arabesques, which reflected a
political allegory rooted in nineteenth-century architectural theory and practice. In The Seven Lamps of
Architecture (1849) and elsewhere, English critic John
Ruskin had opposed the social consequences of industrialization by exalting the carved ornament of medieval
churches for its representational naturalism, which
reflected the carver’s apprenticeship in imitating the
perfection of God’s creation, and its handicraft imperfections, which registered the integration of design and
execution prior to the division of labor. Ruskin had made
this interpretation the basis of an allegory wherein
Gothic naturalism reflected the political freedom enjoyed
within Christian humanist society, while the stylized
geometry of Islamic architecture represented its
antipode: “Oriental despotism” (Fig. 9).
This allegory provided Bragdon with a way of
engaging the political context of Progressive Era
America. The problem of balancing individual liberty
against collective needs, a permanent dilemma of
democratic society, was a particular focus of Progressive
attempts to reform the city and its governance. Architectural Record editor and New Republic founder Herbert
Croly spoke for many reformers when he argued in 1909
that “a more highly socialized democracy is the only
practical substitute on the part of convinced democrats
for an excessively individualized democracy.”5
Croly and many other progressives saw the “socializa-
119
Fig. The Vine, Free and in Service: one
of Ruskin’s representations of the contrast
between freehand naturalism and geometric stylization, which he associated with the
supposed contrast between Christian
freedom and Islamic “despotism.” John
Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (London,
1851–3)
Fig. In this allegorical drawing, one
of a series depicting the education of the
architect in Bragdon’s 1932 treatise The
Frozen Fountain, the architect’s drawing
hand (here allegorized by the knight’s
stylus/lance) follows a pattern already
established by the invariant geometric order
of a notionally Islamic garden. See also
the pattern derived from the 3 x 3 square in
the lower left-hand corner of Fig. 2
tion” of the polity in largely pragmatic terms: as a matter
of shifting control over governance from the electorate
toward technocratic commissions, boards, and bureaucracies. Bragdon, by contrast, saw the socialization of
democracy in cultural, subjective, and spiritual terms.
For him, it consisted of encouraging citizens to transcend
ego and merge with the demos or “spirit of the people.”
Bragdon’s ornament reflected this political goal.
Reversing the poles of Ruskin’s architectural ethic,
Bragdon attempted through ornament to socialize
unruly individualism and transform industrial capitalist
fragmentation into democratic brotherhood. Accordingly, the patterns of Bragdon’s ornament disciplined the
free-growing arabesque to the rigorous objectivity of the
geometric crystal. These designs of curved lines yielding
to geometric frames figured the reconciliation of
individual will to the demands of social order. They
symbolized Bragdon’s application of a dose of “Oriental
despotism” to a society in which, he felt, Christian
humanism had been co-opted by laissez-faire capitalism
(Fig. 10). Bragdon sought to endow his ornament with
the beauty of “exquisite acquiescence”: individual will
yielding to the demands of social necessity.6 Projective
ornament was charged with the rhetorical task of
persuading willful individuals to yield gracefully to the
demands of social order.
Bragdon’s term for this graceful yielding was “Beautiful Necessity.” It was a phrase he adopted from Ralph
Waldo Emerson’s 1860 essay “Fate,” an analysis of the
opposition between a materialist discourse of determinist
heredity and the notion of individual free will. Fate and
free will, Emerson claimed, are always in tension; their
antinomy defines the parameters of human action.
Emerson attempted to harmonize opposing points of
view that he felt emphasized too strongly either the
freedom of individual action from the heritage of the
past or the limitation imposed by genetic and cultural
heritage. The main thrust of his essay, however, was
against the materialist discourse of social Darwinism.
Emerson concluded “Fate” with a sermonic exhortation
to sacralize the “Beautiful Necessity” that human
freedom is not at odds with natural law:
Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity,
which secures that all is made of one piece; that
plaintiff and defendant, friend and enemy, animal
and planet, food and eater, are of one kind…
Let us build to the Beautiful Necessity…which
rudely or softly educates [man] to the perception
that Law rules throughout existence, a Law which
is not intelligent but intelligence —not personal nor
impersonal —it disdains words and passes under-
120
Massey —New Necessities
Fig. The dust jacket of the fourth
edition of The Beautiful Necessity,
published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1939
standing; it dissolves persons; it vivifies nature; yet
solicits the pure in heart to draw on all its omnipotence.7
In Emerson’s figure of the “Beautiful Necessity,”
Bragdon saw a harmonious reconciliation of the polar
opposition between individual and society that dominated Progressive Era politics and culture. Whereas
Emerson’s main objective had been to reassert the power
of human action and thought in the face of a social
discourse that used science to legitimize social hierarchy,
Bragdon’s aim was to regulate what he took to be the
excessive individualism of his era by exalting the
principle of free will yielding to the constraints of an
egalitarian social order. The title of Bragdon’s 1910
treatise evoked his assertion that “Art is at all times
subject to the Beautiful Necessity of proclaiming the
world order.”8 Projective ornament was an “altar” of the
kind Emerson had exhorted his readers to build: it
sacralized the mathematical laws that for Bragdon
characterized the natural “world order.” The magic line
figure that graced the dust jacket of the book (a knight’s
tour pattern) gave formal expression to Bragdon’s ethos
of “exquisite acquiescence” (Fig. 11). Contrasted with
the freehand naturalism of Ruskin’s nature studies, it
emphatically posited that —for the twentieth century, at
least —study of nature would reveal an impersonal order
to which all things must conform.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and
Lectures (New York: Literary Classics
of the United States, 1983), 967– 8.
Claude Bragdon, The Beautiful
Necessity (New York: Knopf, 1922), 9.
For a survey of Western sumptuary
regulation, see Alan Hunt, Governance
of the Consuming Passions: A History
of Sumptuary Law (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1996).
Christopher J. Berry, The Idea of
Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical
Investigation (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), 63.
In addition to Berry, see Diane
Owen Hughes, “Sumptuary Law and
Social Relations in Renaissance Italy,”
in John Bossy (ed.), Disputes and
Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983),
69 –100; and Catherine Kovesi
Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy,
1200 –1500 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2002).
Quoted in Daniel L. Purdy, The
Tyranny of Elegance: Consumer
Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Goethe
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1998), 99.
Quoted in Hughes, “Sumptuary
Law and Social Relations in Renaissance Italy,” 77.
Sumptuary regulation
We can recognize in Bragdon’s concept of “Beautiful
Necessity” a modern instance of the perennial Western
use of rhetorics of need to regulate desire. Bragdon’s
ethos of “exquisite acquiescence,” had precursors in
classical, Renaissance, and early modern traditions of
regulating luxury in service of political goals. Within the
Western tradition, sumptuary codes since antiquity have
regulated consumption to maintain particular aspects of
social order.9 Sumptuary laws regulate luxury by
identifying some desires as excessive and thus illegitimate. 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 by
broader discourse about luxury that has drawn and
redrawn distinctions between needs and desires. In The
Idea of Luxury, Christopher Berry reviews some of the
changing frameworks within which luxury has been
conceptualized and regulated. The regulation of
consumption in ancient Rome, he explains, operated in
the name of republican polity: “Luxury was a political
question because it signified the presence of the poten-
121
Fig. Clothing as an index to social
position: depictions of the attire proper to
individuals of different social stations in
late-17th-century Nuremberg
tially disruptive power of human desire, a power which
must be policed.”10 Within this republican ethos, desires
stimulated by luxury were seen to subvert good social
order because they emphasized the pursuit of selfish
pleasures that could jeopardize commitment to the
public good. In Medieval Europe luxury was generally
viewed within a Christian ethics that conflated it with
lechery: terms such as the French luxure and the Latin
luxuria signified both luxury and sexual lasciviousness.
Renaissance attitudes toward luxury revived elements of
the Roman tradition and commingled them with
medieval Christian views. The Renaissance civic humanist tradition saw luxury as a corruption of resources
that should instead support the independence a citizen
needed to act virtuously in the polis.11
Attitudes toward luxury found expression in sumptuary laws that at various times regulated what individuals
could wear and eat, what kinds of furnishings they could
possess, and how they could conduct funerals and
weddings. The quantitative high point of sumptuary law
occurred in the absolutist societies of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. These regimes greatly increased
the number and degree of sumptuary distinctions in
order to clarify individuals’ standing within a minutely
graded prestige economy. Absolutist sumptuary laws
sought, in the words of one preamble, to preserve the
visible differences in rank “which God and all propriety
requires, without which also the political harmony and
the commonwealth of continued well-being would no
longer exist”12 (Fig. 12).
In modernity the political implications of luxury were
redefined in terms more often economic than moral. The
centralization of political authority that had begun
under the princely courts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries continued with the rise of large, imperial
nation-states. Mercantilist economists and social
thinkers such as Adam Smith elaborated a political
economy of luxury based on criteria of economic wellbeing and national prosperity within the context of
global trade. The emergent mercantile ethos can be
discerned in the language of sumptuary codes from maritime trading cities such as Venice and Genoa beginning
as early as the fourteenth century. Preambles to sumptuary codes, which frequently attempted to spell out the
rationale for legislation, began to include managing
investment among their stated motivations. A Venetian
law of 1360, for instance, proclaimed, “Our state has
become less strong because money that should navigate
and multiply… lies dead, converted into vanities.”13
Later mercantile doctrines increasingly assessed
luxury consumption within a framework of economic
122
Massey —New Necessities
well-being. Because it stimulated consumption, luxury
could be justified if it promoted a positive balance of
trade, which mercantilists considered to yield positive
social well-being. In other words, a new discourse
reconstituted the distinction between necessity and
luxury in terms based on the new political criterion of
national political economy.
As the transition from caste to class society gained
momentum, regulation of consumption was liberalized
in parallel with political liberalization. With some
exceptions, such as restrictions on drug consumption,
modern sumptuary regulation is typically conducted
through economic incentives. Complex and precisely
calibrated tax codes encourage some kinds of consumption and discourage others by assessing them at different
rates.
See Johanna B. Moyer, “Sumptuary
Law in Ancien Régime France,
1229 –1806” (.. dissertation,
Syracuse University, 1996).
See Norbert Elias, The Court
Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New
York: Pantheon, 1983 [1969]); Werner
Szambien, Symétrie, gout, caractère:
Théorie et terminologie de l’architecture
à l’âge classique, 1550 –1800 (Paris:
Picard, 1986); and Peter Kohane and
Michael Hill, “The Eclipse of a
Commonplace Idea: Decorum in
Architectural Theory,” in Architectural
Research Quarterly, 5:1 (2001): 63–77.
Quoted in Elias, The Court Society, 59.
Quoted in Elias, The Court Society, 58.
Max Weber, Wirtschaft und
Gesellschaft (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr,
1922), 750; quoted in Elias, The Court
Society, 38.
Elias, The Court Society, 63.
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere:
An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger
and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge:
Polity Press; Cambridge, Mass.:
Press, 1989 [1962]), 27.
Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” (1784), in Kant, Foundations
of the Metaphysics of Morals and What
is Enlightenment?, trans. Lewis White
Beck (New York: Bobbs-Merrill,
1959), 85– 92: 87.
Roger Chartier, The Cultural
Origins of the French Revolution, trans.
Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham and
London: Duke University Press,
1991), 26.
Sylvia Lavin, “Re Reading the
Encyclopedia: Architectural Theory
and the Formation of the Public in
Late-Eighteenth-Century France,”
Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians, 53:2 (1994): 184– 92.
Necessary luxury
Architectural ornament enjoyed a relative freedom from
this tradition of legislative regulation. Medieval and
Renaissance sumptuary codes typically focused on the
ornamentation of clothing and on the ways a family
observed weddings and funerals, occasions that had a
public character in an age of large families acting in
a corporate manner within small cities and city-states.
Absolutist codes concerned not only dress but also the
trim and decoration of carriages, as well as furnishings
and draperies.14
In ancien régime society, architectural representation
was regulated less through legal codes than by professional codes such as the doctrine of convenance. Convenance was a body of principles for ensuring that the
design of houses conformed to the ranked display of
prestige through which power in court society was
articulated.15 The classical orders, linked to degrees of
ostentation and sumptuousness, marked social distinction within a system of representation based on gradations of prestige. Hôtels particuliers were built and
designed with the client’s particular family or “house” in
mind, and architects made each hotel’s form and
ornamentation conform to the social status of its occupants. This system not only expressed the distinction
between those of noble and common birth; it also
articulated gradations within the nobility. Nobles of the
sword or the robe, of royal or of merely aristocratic
rank, the Encyclopédie notes, are figures “who, not
holding the same rank in society, should have habitations
fitted out so as to mark the superiority or inferiority of
the different orders of the state”16 (Fig. 13). The authors
of the Encyclopédie wrote of aristocratic hôtels particuliers that “the character of their decoration requires a
123
beauty fitting the birth and rank of the persons who have
them built; nevertheless they should never exhibit the
magnificence reserved for the palaces of kings.”17
The principles of convenance remind us that in ancien
régime society luxury consumption was itself a form of
necessity. Court society was a prestige economy in which
the display of wealth was a crucial part of maintaining
status. According to Max Weber, “‘Luxury’ in the sense
of a rejection of the purposive-rational orientation of
consumption is, to the feudal ruling class, not something
‘superfluous,’ but one of the means of its social selfassertion.”18 This changed in capitalist modernity, as
decisions of expenditure and investment came to be
based on their impact on capital accumulation. The
bourgeois ethos of economic rationality advocated
keeping consumption below income level so that
surpluses could be invested to generate increased future
income. It stimulated a canon of behavior quite different
from that of the prestige economy of court society, in
which expenditures for display were considered necessary
even when they exceeded incomes and so led to financial
ruin. As Norbert Elias explains, “In a society in which
every outward manifestation of a person has special
significance, expenditure on prestige and display is for
the upper classes a necessity which they cannot avoid.”19
For a society of necessary luxury, architectural ostentation is not superfluous but essential.
Despite its consonance with other forms of ancien
régime sumptuary regulation, convenance was not a legal
code such as those that regulated ornament in dress,
Fig. Ornamental magnificence as an
index of social position: section of the royal
audience chamber at the Palais Royal
dishware, coaches, furnishings, and other cultural
domains. It was instead a professional ideology, a code of
decorum formulated by architects and knowledgeable
amateurs, such as the Abbé Cordemoy, and disseminated
through treatises and other written commentaries. In this
sense, convenance was a liminal regulatory device
between absolutist and republican societies. Although its
principle of graduated social representation through
controlled magnificence was typical of court society, its
form and mode of operation were characteristic of
postrevolutionary “professional-bourgeois” society. In
operating through the public sphere, using published
discourse as its mode of codification and public opinion
as its mode of enforcement, the doctrine of convenance
reflected the rise of the bourgeois public sphere. It helped
to inaugurate the modern “publicity of representation”
that Jürgen Habermas has identified as a primary form
of political decision-making in liberal societies.
As Habermas argued in his 1962 book The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere, liberal modernity
is characterized by the emergence of the public sphere as
a middle-class arena for political participation through
discussion and debate, conducted in such new institutions as salons, cafés, and clubs, as well as newspapers
and other print publications. As a domain distinct from
both the court and the larger populace, the public sphere
afforded members of the middle class an arena within
which to formulate shared opinion about matters of
common concern. In this new realm of “private persons
come together as a public,” participants’ status was
bracketed, so opinions were assessed more for their
reasoning than for the prestige of their advocates.20 In
this way, the bourgeois public sphere provided an
autonomous venue for the “public use of one’s private
reason” that Immanuel Kant identified as the primary
technique of enlightenment.21 The consensus formed by
public sphere discourse —public opinion —acquired
authority as enlightened thought, a category that in
theory represented the consensus humanity at large
would reach if it had the means and opportunity for
collective reasoning.22
The rise of the public sphere as a domain of ideas
autonomous from social hierarchy contributed to the
emergence of new criteria for judging works of art and
architecture. Among the subjects of debate in salons,
coffee houses, and periodicals were paintings, sculptures,
and buildings. Architecture criticism, like criticism of
art and literature, represented the application to
architecture of the new standards of rational evaluation.23 Rather than being judged for its consonance with
religious faith or scientific truth, art began to be judged
124
Massey —New Necessities
See Marc Grignon and Juliana
Maxim, “Convenance, Caractère, and
the Public Sphere,” Journal of Architectural Education, 49:1 (September
1995), 29 –37.
See Michael Osman et al. (eds.),
Perspecta 33: Mining Autonomy
(Cambridge, Mass.: Press, 2002),
especially the essays by Hubert
Damisch and Anthony Vidler.
Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the
Public Sphere: A Contribution to the
Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge,
Mass.: Press, 1992); reprinted in
Bruce Robbins (ed.), The Phantom
Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 1–32: 7.
Lavin, “Re Reading the Encyclopedia,” 185.
See Thorstein Veblen, The Theory
of the Leisure Class: An Economic
Study in the Evolution of Institutions
(New York: Macmillan, 1899). Elias
notes that the sumptuary practices
Veblen described as “conspicuous
consumption” are distinct from those
of court society. Conspicuous consumption describes ostentation that
expresses an ethos of wealth, whereas
the ostentation of court society is
bound up in an ethos of caste and is a
more central technique of power.
in aesthetic terms —that is to say, for its evocation of
disinterested pleasure in the observer. The disinterest
through which Kant characterized the emergent practice
of aesthetic judgment was one aspect of the bracketing of
status in the bourgeois public sphere. The autonomy of
art —its judgment and creation according to independent, internal standards —was linked to the political,
economic, and moral autonomy of the middle class.
The decline of sumptuary law was part of this process
of autonomization. The rise of a new political and
economic rationality eroded the social importance of
luxury. As capitalist economic rationality became
normative, prestige expenditure gave way to investment
in productive enterprise.
Architectural modernism emerged out of this
rewriting of the representational contract between architecture and society, in part by creating a new framework
for the use of architectural ornament. The beginnings of
modernist reduction of ornament are usually traced to
the shift in French architectural theory from the
discourse of convenance to that of caractère.24 Some of
the designs of Ledoux, Boullée, Lequeu, and others
began to replace convenance with new modes of representation and communication that reflected the emergent
liberal society. Such “revolutionary” architecture
minimized ornament to cultivate such new representational techniques as Ledoux’s architecture parlante and
Boullée’s experimental sublimes (Fig. 14). Over the
course of a century and more, aristocratic and bourgeois
modes of architectural representation competed with
one another and with alternative approaches: a project
such as Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera vividly demonstrates the continuing emphasis on magnificence even in
buildings that celebrated the expanding bourgeoisie.
Early-twentieth-century modernism can be seen as the
hegemony of the values that emerged during the earlier
Revolutionary moment. In pursuit of architectural
autonomy, mainstream modernism eliminated or
sublimated ornament by treating the building as a work
of art to be appreciated in aesthetic terms rather than
read as a sign of its inhabitants’ social position within a
caste society.25
We tend to understand the decline of sumptuary law
and the rise of aesthetic autonomy as a liberatory
process. But it would be a mistake to think of the
aesthetic as an autonomous zone of freedom from
sumptuary regulation. As the case of Bragdon suggests,
modernist architectural discourse developed new ways of
drawing the distinction between luxury and necessity.
It also developed new ways of regulating those practices
it considered luxurious or excessive.
125
Extensions and critiques of Habermas’ account of
the public sphere have suggested that the bourgeois
public sphere was not only a liberalizing counterweight
to absolutist authority, but also a technique of exclusion
that exercised new forms of control over public discourse.
Scholars such as Joan Landes, Mary Ryan, and Nancy
Fraser have argued that the bourgeois public sphere was
constituted by exclusions based on gender, class, and
other social criteria. It was always in competition with a
range of “counterpublics” formed by different constituencies and operating through varied styles of
political behavior and norms of public speech. As Fraser
puts it, “the bourgeois public was never the public.”26
By recognizing only certain forms of discourse, the
normative public sphere limited participation to those
educated in those kinds of literacy; by recognizing only
certain contexts for debate, it limited the impact of those
excluded from those domains based on sex, race, or
class. Even a principle such as that of bracketing status
to diminish “irrational” authority differentials could
function repressively, by excluding some styles of
comportment and discourse. In this view, the public
sphere analyzed by Habermas —bourgeois, masculinist,
and highly literate —was a way for a segment of the
middle class to contain the authority of these other
publics.
The hegemonic dimension of the bourgeois public
sphere identified by Fraser and others can be discerned
also within architectural discourse. Sylvia Lavin suggests
that as Enlightenment architectural theory “began to
Fig. Autonomous architecture:
Ledoux’s Shelter for the Rural Guards
project for the ideal city of Chaux, 1771
focus on providing the means for normalizing and
codifying individual aesthetic response and for envisaging the production of a coherent body of public opinion
on matters hitherto considered to be largely subjective”
it created “an aesthetic discourse through which taste
was regulated.”27
This recognition helps to make sense of modernist
approaches to architectural ornament. Around the turn
of the twentieth century, new rhetorics of “necessity”
emerged to discipline consumption and expression by
regulating ornament. Bragdon’s development and
discussion of projective ornament is a case in point.
Bragdon approached ornament as a terrain of negotiation of the relation between luxury and necessity, private
desire and public good. His decision to focus on
ornament was strategic: ornament was a terrain in flux.
The bourgeois productivist ethos was eroding its
rationale, yet ornament persisted as a site where
capitalist class distinctions were articulated through
the new practice of conspicuous consumption.28 In the
hope of eliminating this site of invidious distinction,
Bragdon made ornament the site for deployment of a
new necessity. With projective ornament, Bragdon
created something paradoxical within the traditional
theory of convenance: a universal ornament suitable to all
classes and building types. Yet in its antagonism to
luxury and ostentation, projective ornament reasserted
the tradition of sumptuary regulation —now in the
service of bourgeois and egalitarian rather than aristocratic ends.
Middle-class decorum
Bragdon’s approach represents a minority position
within early-twentieth-century modernism. Projective
ornament never acquired the universal currency for
which it was intended. Yet Bragdon’s alternative
modernism yields insights into mainstream modernism.
If we compare Bragdon’s ornament reform to those
of Hermann Muthesius and Adolf Loos, for instance, we
can see that even radically divergent approaches to
ornament shared the basic aim of sumptuary law: to
regulate expression in the name of social order.
German architect, writer, and government minister
Muthesius (1861–1927) shaped modernist thinking
in German-speaking countries through publications in
which he advocated the practical informality of
nineteenth-century English and Scottish houses as a
model for the renewal of twentieth-century German
building practice (Fig. 15). In his 1902 treatise StyleArchitecture and Building-Art, Muthesius railed against
the aristocratic pretensions of the German middle class,
126
Massey —New Necessities
Hermann Muthesius, StyleArchitecture and Building-Art: Transformations of Architecture in the
Nineteenth Century and Its Present
Condition, introd. and trans. Stanford
Anderson (Santa Monica: Getty
Center for the History of Art and the
Humanities, 1994 [1902; rev. 1903]),
53.
Muthesius, Style-Architecture and
Building-Art, 79.
Muthesius, Style-Architecture and
Building-Art, 79.
Muthesius, Style-Architecture and
Building-Art, 79.
Adolf Loos, Spoken into the Void:
Collected Essays 1897–1900, 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 and
Crime” (1908), in Ulrich Conrads
(ed.), Programs and Manifestoes on
20th-Century Architecture, trans.
Michael Bullock (Cambridge, Mass.:
Press, 1970 [1964]), 19 –24.
Massimo Cacciari has argued that
Loos was less an agent of capitalist
rationalization than its most profound
critic: the disjunctive synthesis of his
houses proclaimed the impossibility of
dwelling in fragmented, disenchanted
modernity and so developed a radical
critique of modern rationalization. See
Massimo Cacciari, Architecture and
Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern
Architecture, trans. Stephen Sartarelli
(New Haven: Yale University Press,
1993). While I admire the subtlety and
eloquence of Cacciari’s interpretation,
it seems to me that Loos’s criticism of
modernity coexisted with a fervent
embrace of rationalization. If the
absence of ornament from Loos’s
interiors and exteriors signified his
rejection of the “false synthesis”
imposed by Secession members, it also
proclaimed his positive affirmation of
the bourgeois productivist ethos of
renunciation and rationalization.
Loos’s strenuous advocacy of modernization in his journalism is among the
most impassioned modernist expressions of the professional-bourgeois
ethos of rationality. Likewise, it is
possible to read Loos’s sartorial stance
as an instance of the defensive use of
fashion as “a veil and a protection for
everything spiritual and now all the
more free,” in the words of Georg
Simmel (Simmel, “Fashion,” International Quarterly, 10, trans. unknown
[New York: 1904], reprinted in Donald
N. Levine [ed.], Georg Simmel on
Individuality and Social Forms
[Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1971], 294–323: 312). Yet even if we
read Loos’s middle-class masculine
fashion ideal as a mask that protects
his “soul” from metropolitan depredations, it is also true that he advocated
that fashion ideal as a repressive
discipline vis-à-vis Secessionist
“aesthetic dress.”
which produced a “sham culture” manifest especially
in the taste for rich ornament. Muthesius characterized
the modern lack of decoration as a quintessentially
“burgerlich” trait, part of the middle-class rejection of
aristocratic “pomp and need for representation.”29
Muthesius associated extravagance in architectural
decoration with other kinds of excess. In a section on
“Dress and Dwelling” he emphasized the bourgeois basis
of nineteenth-century “transformations toward simplicity and unconditional functionality.” “Today’s clothing,”
Muthesius proclaimed, “is the same for all the classes of
society: its singular characteristic is that it defines in
every respect the middle-class ideal, whereas in the
eighteenth century the particular customs, way of life,
and clothing of the highest class set the standard.”30
The turn-of-the-century “unornamented dress and
topcoat” was the epitome of modernity because it
exemplified “the tendency toward the strict matter-offact, in the elimination of every merely applied decorative form, and in shaping each form according to
demands set by purpose.”31 Muthesius discerned the
same tendency in dwellings, where reforms “strive to
increase the amount of light and air, to design strictly
functional rooms, to avoid all useless appendages in the
decoration, to eliminate heavy, unmovable household
furnishings, and to strive for an overall sense of brightness and impression of cleanliness. These reforms,”
Muthesius asserted, “follow the same tendency as our
clothing, the closer dwelling that envelops us.”32 In both
cases, the necessity of representation within the
courtly prestige economy had been replaced by a
functionalist necessity.
Like Muthesius, Moravian-born Viennese architect
Loos (1870 –1933) criticized as “philistine sham” the
aristocratic pretensions of his middle-class compatriots,
particularly in his 1898 series of weekly reviews of the
Vienna Jubilee Exposition in the Neue Freie Presse,
subsequently gathered into the 1921 collection Spoken
into the Void. Like both Muthesius and Bragdon, Loos
wrote in service of a social reform project pursued
through cultural revitalization. Loos’s work was a
concerted campaign to strip the ornament from
language, from dress, and from dwelling. Instead, he
advocated “correct form, solid materials, precise
execution”33 (Fig. 16). His essay “Men’s Fashion”
characterized good taste in men’s clothing in a way that
anticipated Muthesius’s conflation of functional utility
with good taste. Loos opened his essay with a review
of 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,
127
Fig. A minimally ornamented Scottish
house exterior advanced by Muthesius as a
model of middle-class decorum
Fig. The minimally ornamented exterior
of Loos’s Müller House (Prague, 1930)
even like the king if he wants.”34 The trouble, he went on
to say, was that too many Germans and especially
Austrians took advantage of that freedom by adopting
distinctive, aristocratic, “artistic” clothing styles. Loos
had nothing but disdain for these dandies and their
outfits: “double-breasted waistcoats and checked suits
with velvet collars!… a jacket with blue velvet cuffs!”35
Loos took such extravagances of personality in
clothing as markers of an evolutionary lag. He associated
them with the financially reckless expenditures of courtly
prestige economy. This was a more pressing issue in
Vienna, where the Habsburgs still held court in the
Baroque splendor of the Hofburg, than in more metropolitan cities such as London or New York, where the
ethos of investing capital for productive return had more
fully taken root. Loos also saw “artistic” garments as
breaches of sexual decorum, public eruptions of
a sensuality that had to be kept private —had to be
bracketed —in order to sustain the rational exchanges of
liberal bourgeois society. He applied a similar logic to
architecture, identifying cultural advancement with the
elimination of decoration from objects of everyday use,
among which he included buildings.
The continuity between Loos’s militation against
architectural ornament and older traditions of regulating
ornament to maintain social order is especially clear
when we set Loos’s attitude toward architectural
ornament in the context of his broader lifestyle principles. His criticisms of ornamental cookery (“I eat roast
beef ”) and of ornamentation in clothing (“Anyone who
goes around in a velvet coat today is not an artist but a
buffoon or a house painter”) established a continuum
between his views on ornament in architecture and in
other domains of culture.36 The common basis of these
views was the conviction that ornament was wasted
labor-power: hours of human labor spent ornamenting
clothing and buildings should rationally have been
directed toward modernizing Austro-Hungarian society.
The investment of time and money in ornament, like the
continuing rule of the Habsburg family over the AustroHungarian empire, was for Loos a vestige of prestige
economy inhibiting a modernization that was already far
advanced elsewhere, particularly England and the United
States. Loos’s hostility to ornament stemmed from his
application to Austrian society of an analysis based on
the productivist ethos of capitalist modernity.37
The terms in which modernists such as Muthesius and
Loos sought to regulate ornament suggest that architectural modernism reflected not the decline of sumptuary
regulation but its reformulation in liberal terms.
Modernism revived the regulatory role of ornament, but
Massey —New Necessities
128
in the service of bourgeois ideals such as functionality,
universality, and economic productivity. At the same
time, modernism developed new modes of codification
and enforcement: while earlier sumptuary regulation had
operated through legislation, in modernity a proliferating discourse about ornament instead mobilized public
opinion as a regulatory device.
See Michel Foucault, Discipline and
Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans.
Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon,
1978 [1975]), especially part 3, “Discipline,” 135–228. See also Foucault, “The
Subject and Power,” in Hubert L.
Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel
Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and
Hermeneutics, 2nd edn. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1983),
208 –26; and Foucault, The History of
Sexuality, : 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 Consuming
Passions, 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.
Aesthetic discipline
We can understand the reformatting of sumptuary
regulation exemplified by Loos, Muthesius, and Bragdon
as an example of the rise of the disciplinary modality of
power that Michel Foucault argued characterizes liberal
modernity. In his studies of medicine, penology, and
sexuality, Foucault contended that in liberal societies
power was generally not centralized, as it had been under
monarchical sovereignty, but dispersed across the whole
of society. New practices such as individuated incarceration, clinical medicine, nationalized schooling, and
military drilling implemented a set of disciplines that
drew individuals into their own self-regulation. By
training bodies and minds in particular ways, modern
institutions instilled in their subjects a discipline that led
them to conform voluntarily to social imperatives.38
In this analysis, the separation of public and private
identified by Habermas as a constitutive dimension of
liberal modernity did not create a domain of autonomy
wherein subjects were free from regulation. Instead, that
separation extended the reach of power into more areas
of life through new techniques of social control. The
liberal ethic of personal freedom emerged in tandem with
newly internalized modes of regulation. As David
Halperin puts it, liberal power, “far from enslaving its
objects, constructs them as subjective agents and
preserves them in their autonomy, so as to invest them all
the more completely… The state… can safely leave [its
subjects] to make their own choices in the allegedly
sacrosanct private sphere of personal freedom which
they now inhabit, because within that sphere they freely
and spontaneously police both their own conduct and the
conduct of others.”39
Foucault’s argument that power in liberal modernity
is dispersed across the whole social field through
practices of self-regulation is corroborated in the case of
sumptuary regulation by historians such as Alan Hunt.
In his history of sumptuary regulation, Hunt claims that
modernity has been characterized by “a general expansion of discipline and surveillance” that has suffused the
private sphere with more indirect forms of sumptuary
regulation.40 Now spread across a range of both public
and private forms of governance, sumptuary regulation
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
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 consensus 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 understatement”43 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).
Purdy’s 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 rise
of 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 unsuspected heights,” he claimed in “Ornament and Crime”
(1908), describing aesthetic perception as the sublimation of sensuous pleasures that in less modern societies
had been gratified by ornament. These views constructed
close links between economic rationalization and
aesthetic 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 disseminating the aesthetic attitude toward works of art that
supported such a redirection of investment. Loos’s
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
Massey —New Necessities
Fig. (left) “Uniforms, compulsory and
voluntary,” from Goldman & Salatsch
advertisements printed in Loos’s 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 from
Adolf Loos, Spoken into the Void
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.”
130
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 bracketing 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 Muthesius’s text, which establishes strict
parameters for the “free” exercise of judgment. Muthesius claimed:
The wind that today blows across our culture is
middle class, just as today we all work, just as
everyone’s 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 be
engaged more genuinely than in the worn out,
ostentatious cramming of our houses today.46
Muthesius’s rhetoric confirms that modernist sublimation of ornament constructed aesthetic judgment as a
disciplinary technique.
As with Loos and Muthesius, Bragdon’s 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
131
Fig. (above) One of Bragdon’s renderings showing potential applications of
projective ornament
Fig. (below) “The Audience Chamber,”
a rendering —possibly of a design for the
stage —from Bragdon’s 1918 book
Architecture and Democracy (New York:
Knopf, 1918), 111
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 Theosophical 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).
Bragdon’s 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), a
tradition that Bragdon mobilized against the use of
splendor for purposes of conspicuous consumption. The
emphasis on ornament and other marks of distinction in
Bragdon’s 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. Bragdon’s 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 Whereas
Loos and Muthesius constructed a productivist discipline 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, Bragdon’s approach to social regulation through ornament lost out to a mainstream stance
derived 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
Massey —New Necessities
Regarding the modernist white
wall as an aesthetic sublimation of
ornament, see Mark Wigley, White
Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: Press, 1995).
Marc Grignon and Juliana
Maxim, “Convenance, Caractère, and
the Public Sphere.”
132
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 taxcode incentives did not mean that the regulation of
display declined. Architectural ornament, like clothing
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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 deportment and professional ideology.
We tend to think of the aesthetic, and of “autonomous 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 architecture” 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 repressive bracketing techniques.48
Marc Grignon and Juliana Maxim have characterized
the highly articulated doctrine of convenance 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 of convenance as not just as the final product
of the classical system, but also the beginning of modern
discursive regulation. Convenance was not only “crepuscular,” as Grignon and Maxim judiciously observe, but
also auroral.
Acknowledgement
I am grateful to Lauren Kogod for
commenting on the essay and sharing her
expertise on Muthesius.