Believe me, I was young once too. As young as the members of the German Association of Craftsmen, the Austrian Association of Craftsmen, the etc., etc. I too, when I was still a boy, liked the beautiful ornaments that decorated our household, I too was intoxicated by the word Kunstgewerbe [craft] – the term in those days for what we yesterday called angewandte Kunst [applied art] and today call Werkkunst [artwork] – and I too felt deep sadness when I looked down my body to my feet and could discover in my coat, my waistcoat, my trousers and my shoes nothing at all in the way of art, whether craft-based art, applied art or any art at all.

But I grew older, and in my adolescence it struck me that in former times the coat had harmonized with the wardrobe. Then both had ornaments, both demonstrated the same artistic practice, and so all that remained to me was to think about who was right – today’s ornament-free coat or today’s wardrobe with the traditional ornaments of Renaissance, Rococo or Empire style. We agreed. That both the coat and the wardrobe should correspond to the spirit of our time. I and the others. But I bade farewell to my boyhood dreams, while the others remained true to them. I opted for the coat. I said the coat was right. I thought that it and not the wardrobe was made in the spirit of our time. It had no ornaments. Fine – it was hard for me to think that way, but I thought it through – our age has no ornaments. What, no ornaments? When ornaments sprouted and blossomed from Jugendstil, from Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, Dekorative Kunst, etc.? And I thought the matter through again and again, however much it hurt, I thought that these newly discovered ornaments had less to do with our time than the false imitation of old styles. I thought that they were nothing but the morbid ravings of individuals who had unhappily lost contact with the age; in short, I thought what I set out in my lecture ‘Ornament and Crime’.

So once again: the suit I wear is really made in the spirit of our time, and I will believe in it until my dying day, even if I am the only person in the world with such a belief. But I also found many other objects which demonstrate this spirit of our age. There were shoes and boots, suitcases and horse-harnesses, cigarette cases and clocks, pearl necklaces and rings, sticks and umbrellas, cars and visiting cards. And at the same time the works of our craft, which reveal a quite different spirit.

I tried to find the reason for this diametrical opposition. I found it easily. All – for me – untimely works were made by craftsmen who had become dependent on artists and architects, while the works that were timely were made by craftsmen to whom the architect delivered no designs.

For me the principle applied: if you want to have a contemporary craft, if you want to have contemporary utility objects, poison the architects.

In those days, now twenty years ago, I was prudent in not voicing this suggestion. I was cowardly and feared the consequences. So I took another path. I said to myself: I want to teach the carpenter to work as if no architect had ever blundered into his workshop.

That was more easily said than done. It was as if a man were to invent our modern men’s clothing after everyone had been walking around in Greek, Burgundian, Egyptian or Rococo costume for a whole century, as if for a masked ball. But when I considered the tailor’s profession, I could say to myself: a hundred years have not brought so many revolutions with them. A hundred years ago one wore blue tails with gold buttons; today one wears black tails with black buttons. Should carpentry really be any different?

I thought: perhaps these wretched architects have also left behind something in carpentry that might be connected with the contemporary, perhaps something in carpenters’ workshops has escaped their loathsome hands and has without their help taken the calm route of development? I thought this when I woke up and when I went to sleep, when I ate and drank, when I went for a walk, in short, always and everywhere. Then my eye fell upon the good old water tank with its wooden cladding, which forms the back wall of the water closet in the old system.

What joy! All other objects that serve to cleanse us, the bath and the wash basin, in short all sanitary articles, have been spared by ‘artists’. There were probably various articles under the bed that were decorated by artists’ hands with Rococo ornaments, but they were rare. And so that single piece of carpentry – by virtue of not being noble enough – had escaped ‘applied art’.

What was the essential aspect of this wooden cladding? I must ask to be able to say a few words about carpentry technique. The carpenter can in different ways bring together pieces of wood to form a plane. One of them is the system: frame and filling. Between the frame and the filling a profiled block of wood was inserted as a transition, or else the frame, since the filling was almost always recessed, was given a profile, a concave shape. Very abruptly the filling lay half a centimetre behind the frame. That was all. A hundred years ago it had been exactly the same. Now I knew for certain that nothing in this form had changed, and that all experiments with which the Vienna Secession and the Modern Belgian School had suddenly assailed us were aberrations.

The place of the fantastical forms of previous centuries, the place of the blossoming ornamentation of earlier times, had therefore to be occupied by pure, clean construction. Straight lines, right angles: that is how the craftsman works, who has nothing but his purpose before his eyes, and material and tools.

A colleague (he is today a leading Viennese architect) once said to me: ‘Your ideas might apply to cheap work. But what do you do when you have to furnish a home for a millionaire?’ From his perspective he was correct. Fantastical form, ornamentation was the most precious thing anyone was familiar with. We still knew nothing about the true differences in quality. But among craftsmen who had been left alone by architects they had always existed. No one was surprised that for a pair of shoes one might pay ten crowns from one cobbler, and fifty from another, even though both were made from the same ‘drawing’ in the shoemaker’s journal. But woe betide the carpenter who asked 50 per cent more than his competitor in his tender! They would not be distinguished according to material and work, and the expensive man, who claimed to deliver the better work, was marked out as a con man.

So this good workman gave up and delivered work as bad as everyone else’s. That too we owe to artists.

Bear in mind that noble material and good work do not merely compensate for a lack of ornament but are far superior to it in terms of exquisiteness. Indeed, they exclude ornament, because today even the most decadent of people would be reluctant to decorate a noble wooden surface with inlay, engrave the strange natural play of a marble panel or cut a wonderful silver fox into small squares to assemble a chessboard pattern with different furs. Past ages did not value material as we do today. Then one could easily – and without a guilty conscience – ornament. We have swapped more glorious things for the ornamentation of earlier periods. A fine material is a miracle of God. I would gladly give all the works of Lalique or all the jewellery of the Wiener Werkstätte for a precious pearl necklace.

But what does the ‘artist’, sitting at the drawing board, know of the fanatical obsession of the pearl trader who spends years of his life assembling a pearl necklace, or the deep needs of the carpenter, who has found a noble piece of wood and now wants to make a particular work from it?!

In 1898 all wood was stained green, blue or purple – the architect had a paint-box at his disposal – and it was only when I first used mahogany in a modern work in my Café Museum in Vienna that the Viennese noticed that there were not just fantastical forms and colours, but also different materials.

And different ways of working. Because I knew this and heeded it, simple items of furniture which I made twenty years ago still live today and are in use (such as a dining room in Buch near Aarau). The fantastical products of the Secession and Jugendstil of those days are gone and forgotten.

Material and work have the right not to be devalued every year by new trends in fashion.