These material objects are not about my doing. They are about my being. Without me being around, the living flesh of my grandfather's flesh, they really are quite absurd. Men may live in Le Corbusier's machines, but as Napoleon used to say, men will die for trinkets. He who steals my Modernist apartment in the Radiant City steals trash, but he who steals my grandfather's hair and his medals is someone violently pruning away the vital structure of my personality.
Ornament lacks explicit function and consumes resources.
They are neurotically obsessed with irrational clutter and therefore in a process of savage degeneration. But this Adolf Loos doctrine also flunks the Grandfather Clause. Adolf Loos may think that doilies and antimacassars are the road to hell, but my grandfather is even more degenerate than that. His corpse is being devoured by microbes and vanishing into the biosphere in a messy, repugnant process of nutrient recovery. Once we cut to the chase and admit that people age, die, and rot, that they sag, that they go blind, they shave and cut their hair, clip their toenails, vomit and eliminate, it seems absurdly squeamish of us to worry about the cherubs on their fruit bowls.