Conditions in the woodcarving and turning trades, the criminally low prices paid to embroiderers and lacemakers, are well known. The producers of ornament must work twenty hours to earn the wages a modern worker gets in eight.
As ornament is no longer a natural product of our civilization, it accordingly represents backwardness or degeneration, and the labour of the man who makes it is not adequately remunerated.
14. Theo Van Doesburg. Postcard. 1920
Even
the damage
inflicts on
Decoration adds to the price of an object as a rule, and yet it can happen that a decorated object, with the same outlay in materials and demonstrably three times as much work, is offered for sale at half the price of a plain object.
Ornament is wasted labour and hence wasted health. That's how it has always been. Today, however, it is also wasted material, and both together add up to wasted capital.
13. Gerrit Rietveld. Child's wheelbarrow. 1923
greater is ornament
the workers.
15. Gerrit Rietveld. Rietveld Schröder House, Utrecht. 1924
The lack of ornament means shorter working hours and consequently higher wages. Chinese carvers work sixteen hours, American workers eight. If I pay as much for a smooth box as for a decorated one, the difference in labour time belongs to the worker. And if there were no ornament at all—a circumstance that will perhaps come true in a few millennia—a man would have to work only four hours instead of eight, for half the work done at present is still for ornamentation.
16. Gerrit Rietveld. The Red and Blue Chair. 1917
17. Theo van Doesburg and Cornelis van Eesteren.
Hotel Particulier. 1923