ABSTRACT
From the moment in the early twentieth century when the Viennese architect-designer, Adolf Loos, proclaimed that ornament should be equated with crime, an essentially rationalist approach to modern design began to dominate all other ways of thinking about the subject. Not only did that view give rise to a highly reductive philosophy of design, summed up by the oft-repeated maxim ‘form follows function’, it also generated a minimal aesthetic for designed artefacts, characterized by geometric forms, undecorated surfaces and a restricted use of colour (Figure 9.1). The underlying intention of the modernist architects and designers was both to reject the status-ridden definition of design that had dominated the world of Victorian material culture and to align it with the efficiency culture of massproduction industry, which aimed to continually maximize its output and increase profitability. In turn, the rationalism that underpinned modernism had its roots in eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideas that had been based on a belief in the power of reason to facilitate social progress.
