Carol Rifelj Lecture Series, Misty Kaplan

Ornament, Crime and the Reglet

In 1910, the architect Adolf Loos gave a lecture titled “Ornament and Crime.” The lecture gave voice to a conviction central to early Modernism: that a building should honestly express its own structure, materials, and purpose, and that the historical ornament being layered onto the architecture of the time, by disguising all three, was a kind of deception. More than a century later, its influence can still be felt in contemporary architecture that reads as seamless and unadorned. Alongside architectural theory and criticism from Loos to the present, this talk explores examples, from shutters to baseboards to AI-generated images, that test this conviction. It traces the increasing complexity of building construction and considers, from a practitioner’s perspective, the technical challenges this poses for creating architecture that appears honest. Using one seemingly innocuous building component, the reglet, as a case study, it asks whether the absence of ornament can itself become a form of ornament.

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