How did Lu Si discuss that "decoration is evil"? Surprisingly, his well-founded arguments come not only from some common reasons such as economy, technology and aesthetics, but also from Freud's psychoanalysis and anthropology. Don't forget, Freud was a contemporary of Lu Si who lived in the same city. A basic logic of Lu Si is that according to Freud's theory, the earliest decoration of human beings is the export of desire. Just as uneducated people can call names, civilized people can't. Civilized people can't vent with "decoration", otherwise it is a crime.
This is a typical sophistry whose logic seems tight but fragile, full of prejudice and superiority of western civilization. Steiner House and Lv Si's representative works in textbooks seem to have only white walls and square windows, which are very close to the "modern" image when he did not have a deep understanding of modernism in the past. But if you go around the back, you can still see the dome roof, and this building is only effective as a diagram of "decoration is evil", far from being a masterpiece of Lv Si. (See my old work.
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Lv Si opposes decoration, but his works use white walls outdoors, and expensive marble veneers are often used indoors, and he is very particular about the patterns of marble veneers. Is this a decoration? In Lu Si's dictionary, it doesn't count. Smith also opposed the decoration, but in the German Pavilion in Barcelona, marble with patterns was carefully selected. From this point of view, Luce and Smith are similar. But the difference is that Miss Marbles are symmetrical up and down, expressing her indifference to gravity in order to achieve a light effect, while Lv Si wants to express a sense of stability under gravity.
Is Ruth really against all decorations? Also, does Ruth really think that modern "civilized people" can't be decorated because they are superior to others? This is not entirely the case. 1909, he published an article called "Architecture" in his own journal, in which he praised the rural houses he saw while traveling in the mountain village near the lake and liked the buildings driven by farmers' instinct. "He is doing the roof, what kind of roof? Beautiful or ugly? He doesn't know, it's the roof. " Quatt, an architectural historian, said: "He (Lv Si) thinks that farmers can use decorations, but civilized people can't, and farmers' work is directly controlled by intuition. Their intuition comes from heredity, because past success has been increasing. "(Adam's House) It seems that he doesn't necessarily think that civilized people are superior, and he is not necessarily so opposed to decoration. So, how to understand the problems that Lv Si faced when making this judgment? What does this question tell us?
It is because industry makes decoration cheaper that the sweat of labor and the joy of creation condensed in decoration are almost gone. The infinite reproduction and dissemination of decoration has lost its attractive aura, and it has become a symbol of vulgarity and exaggeration-this is also the basic proposition of the British "arts and crafts movement" half a century earlier than Lu Si, but unlike Lu Si, the "arts and crafts movement" advocates the restoration of manual opposition to machine production. Vienna demolished the old city wall to build the ring road, and the new buildings along the ring road are all decorated with complicated patterns. At that time, there were many criticisms about the ring road in Vienna, and it was from this issue that Lu Si got his slogan "Decoration is evil".
It seems that through the analysis of the background of the slogan, we found another question that Lu Si didn't actually answer well, but we also encountered it, but we just didn't realize it or found the answer yet. And this question is actually more worth pondering.