Taking as point of departure the title of Adolf Loos’ essay “Ornament and Crime” (1908), this event will seek to map the evolution of aesthetics in Applied Design, the Crafts and Architecture in Central Europe of the first decades of the 20th century.

In both his text and his oeuvre, Adolf Loos (1870-1933), a native of Brno, radically distanced himself
from the aesthetics of ornamentation in Art Nouveau, a movement spearheaded by his contemporary Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939). Mucha, an artist whose biography is intimately tied to Brno and the region of Southern Moravia, had risen to international fame as Art Nouveau’s foremost representative. Through his body of graphic work, he created a unique and instantly recognisable style which he applied to interior design and architecture. Loos’ radical position heralded the dawn of a new era in architectural design, one that would see a shift from figurative ornament towards abstraction and would culminate in the designs of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose Villa Tugendhat in Brno remains a spectacular and daring manifesto of architectural modernism.

Panellists:

  • Professor Robert Votický, Professor Emeritus of Architecture (Brno Technical University; Architecture Institute Prague; Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Bratislava, member of Czech Chamber of Architects, RIBA)
  • Academic Architect Jarmila Mucha Plocková, architect and designer, granddaughter of Alphonse Mucha
  • Moderator: Dr Katerina Garcia, Assistant Professor in Hispanic Studies, School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies, Trinity College Dublin

The panellists will explore the cultural background and aesthetic developments in Central Europe of
the first half of the 20th-century, with the goal to ultimately demonstrate that Art Nouveau and Modernism, rather than representing two chronologically discrete and mutually incompatible aesthetic philosophies, were in fact concurrent movements that defined a momentous, and culturally effervescent, period in Central European history.

Booking is essential, RSVP to the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Dublin (dublin@mzv.gov.cz) 

The event takes place as part of the cultural programme accompanying the current exhibition “Villa Tugendhat” in the Irish Architecture Archive (29 January to 10 April 2026), and the Languages 250 at Trinity (1776-2026) programme.