In the winter of 1924 I stood before the Palais de Tokyo and watched a stone carver shape a chevron into limestone with nothing more than a chisel and an afternoon. The gesture was ancient, but the pattern was unmistakably new — stepped, angular, deliberate. It was neither the organic tendrils of Art Nouveau nor the austere blankness Loos had prescribed. It was ornament with conviction.
The Geometry of Desire
Loos argued that decoration was a primitive impulse civilized societies would outgrow. His logic contained a fatal assumption: that beauty and efficiency were opposing forces, that the hand which carved a rosette was somehow less evolved than the one that poured smooth concrete. The Chrysler Building stands today as his most elegant rebuttal.
Decoration is not a crime to be punished, but a language to be spoken. The modernists who banned ornament silenced a vocabulary older than civilization itself.