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<div class="legacy-text">In his famous 1910 speech 'Ornament And Crime', the architect Adolf Loos' argued for clean modernist lines. His modernist rhetoric came at the expense of ALL decoration and ornamentation. He felt that the desire to ornament our surroundings was somehow primitive and a sign of the degenerate man. Indeed, he argued that "If a tattooed man dies outside of prison, it is merely because he has not yet had the chance to commit his crime". His ideas, along with those of architects Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius went on to shape the course of aesthetics in architecture for the next 50 years. We lost the beauty in form of Art Nouveau and Art Deco and found nothing but brutal minimalist and modernist aesthetics in its wake. We're only just recovering from this kind of thinking today. Modernism is still a mainstay in architectural education and I was told to think along Loos' lines when I was at universtity. Now that I'm a graduate architect, I'd kindly like to tell Loos to stick his opinions where the sun don't shine. My newest tattoo is an ornamented frame with nothing inside. Ornament for ornament's sake. It's human nature to ornament our buildings, decorate the background of our SG photosets and even ink up our skin. The tattooed man is an artist, Mr Loos. The modernists, on the other hand, never were.</div>