Adolf Loos

1870-1933

Unique in the history of modern architecture Influenced the succeeding generations of architects, Le Corbusier in particular His ideas still relevant today Studied in Vienna and Dresden 1893-96 lived in the US and was subsequently an admirer of the AngloAmerican culture Belonged to the same generation as the key figures of Art Nouveau and Jugendstil but opposed their approach to ornamentation Looss critique more fundamental than that of Bruno Paul or Josef Hoffman, who simplified the Secession vocabulary: He rejects the concept of art when it comes to the design of everyday objects

The distinction between art and everyday objects to him is not one based on modes of production (manual or machine) as was the case with the Werkbund A useful object is not defined by its production but its purpose It should transmit impersonal cultural values He admired the Arts and Crafts movement for its reliance on tradition and custom He first became known as the writer of polemical articles He attacked the Austrian middle-class culture but also the avant garde culture that wanted to replace it Ornament and Crime essay (1908) is a key text, influencing later modernism Elimination of ornament leads to the abolition of waste in human labour and the freeing of time for the life of the mind

This attacked not just the Secession but also the Werkbund (founded a year earlier) The artist shouldnt be the primary creator of everyday objects Capitalism and mass-production in his opinion divorce art-value and use-value, which liberates them both We are grateful to [the nineteenth century] for the magnificent accomplishment of having separated the arts and the crafts once and for all. Loos Mathesiuss (Werkbund) search for the style of the time is based on a nostalgia for an organic preindustrial society; the style of the modern age already exists in industrial products without artistic pretensions Art can survive in two forms: as work with no social responsibility, able to offer a critique, and the design of buildings that embody collective memory He systematised these buildings into Denkmal (monument) and Grabmal (the tomb) Private house belongs to the category of the useful, not the monumental

Loos thought in terms of art and industry, art and handicraft, music and drama, never in terms of a Gesamtkunstwerk that would synthesize these different genres in a modern community of the arts. Alan Colquhoun Looshaus, Michaelerplatz, Vienna 1909-11 The only large commercial building in historical urban context Ground floor Goldman and Salatsch gentlemens outfitters, upper floors apartments Lower floors, which belong to the public realm, are decorated (the notion of decorum) The apartment floors stripped of ornament; private connotation He turns the building into a provocation, criticising the Italian palazzo faades of the bourgeois apartment blocks on the Ringstrasse He treats each part of the building according to its function, without unifying it with a classical vocabulary In the Turbine Factory Behrens fuses the classical and the modern (by distorting the classical) while Loos draws attention to the juxtaposition

The Interior He rejected the notion of total design in favour of separate pieces of furniture His interiors made up of found objects - the walls belong to the architects, the furniture to the craftsmen All unity is derived from selective taste, not from originality of design In this he differs from Hoffmann, who still unified everything with decorative inventions Marble facings, wood paneling - use of natural surfaces

Living rooms are often a central space with low-ceiling alcoves The room becomes a miniature social space with private subspaces

His commercial interiors are similarly anonymous and include built-in storage units Designed several cafs as well: Museum Caf, Vienna, 1899 popularly knows as Caf Nihilismus for its iconoclasm Kaertner Bar, Vienna, 1907 Constructs intimacy while expanding space through the use of mirrors

Unlike the French, the English interior was seen to be based on the need for privacy (Viollet-le-Duc) and it became increasingly popular at the end of the 19th Century due to the rise of the spirit of bourgeois individualism This type also had a large central hall, based on the idea of a medieval social harmony This double-height space becomes a prominent feature This culminates in Loos suburban villas 1910-30 He converts the central hall into an open staircase, and compressed a number of individual rooms into a cube The greatest differentiation between the rooms takes place in the piano nobile - reception rooms at different levels and different ceiling heights connected by short flights of steps Irregular spiral ascending through the house This Raumplan turns the experience of the house into a spatio-temporal labyrinth (Colquhoun) The movement of the inhabitant is highly controlled In the late Moller and Mueller house there is also a Ladies room, critically positioned

In the spatial ordering the wall plays a crucial role, experientially as well as structurally Variable levels demand that the walls continue vertically through all the floors Continuity between rooms accomplished by piercing the walls The view is always framed and sense of enclosure retained, giving rooms a theatrical quality

The external walls play a different role - they are pierced by small opening Little visual contact with the outside Externally, these villas are cubes without ornament, which is to match the modern man, while the interior is a sensuous complexity This echoes his notion of the split between tradition and the techno-scientific world (Ort/Raum) Tzara (1926), Moller(192728) and Mueller (1929-30) houses are the final phase The Arts and Crafts and eclectic furnishings replaced with a more rectilinear approach The neutrality of the exterior beings to invade the interior