Adolf Loos

Adolf Loos (b. 1870–d. 1933) was one of the key figures in the early history of modern architecture and design. He was a seminal thinker and practitioner who, through his executed projects and writings, shaped the forms of, and the discussions about, modernism in his time and long afterward. Loos practiced principally in Vienna, where he lived for much of his life, and in Paris, where he resided from 1924 to 1928. But most of his completed works—buildings and interiors—were executed in Czechoslovakia, especially in Prague, Pilsen, and his native Brno. Loos is now known for the extraordinary buildings, most of them single-family houses, he designed in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. These houses explored new possibilities of spatial manipulation in the form of what his assistant Heinrich Kulka first described as the Raumplan: the idea of employing interlocking spaces of differing heights and on different levels. Loos insisted that his Raumplan concept was fundamentally about ways to foster spatial economy, redeeming space from less important rooms and transferring it to more important public areas, This, however, was not always the case. At times, indeed, Loos’s purported spatial calculus provided no spatial dividend at all. Loos’s Haus am Michaelerplatz (Looshaus), for the tailor firm Goldman and Salatsch (1909–1911), the house for Dadaist Tristan Tzara in Paris (1924–1925), the Villa Moller in Vienna (1926–1928), and the Villa Müller in Prague (1928–1930) are the most important realized examples of his Raumplan idea. Loos is perhaps even more significant for his theoretical writings, many of them controversial in his day and that still elicit impassioned responses. He is most celebrated (or reviled) for his 1910 essay “Ornament and Crime.” The piece is frequently read as a full assault on ornament and a call for its wholesale rejection. Yet Loos’s plea was more nuanced, and the piece is a sophisticated argument about modern culture and its meanings. What set Loos apart from most of his fellow modernists was his unwillingness to engage in a complete rejection of past forms and traditions. Loos viewed architecture—and the broader cultural developments from which it issued—as an evolutionary process. Objects and ideas from history, he believed, retained their validity as long as they still had meaning and use in the present.