aahi0000634

Private House (Werkbund Siedlung)

view of street facade

1930

creation

Adolf Loos (Austrian, 1870-1933)

male

(b Brünn [now Brno], Moravia, 10 Dec 1870; d Kalksburg, Austria, 23 Aug 1933). Austrian architect, theorist and writer. He was an often satirical critic of the Vienna Secession, an early advocate of the Functionalist aesthetic, a radical polemicist and one of the most important and influential pioneers of the Modern Movement, achieving in his buildings of c. 1910 the style generally adopted elsewhere only a decade later. 1. Training and early work, before 1910. His father had studied painting but worked as a sculptor and mason in Brünn, then an important industrial centre of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and early contact with his father's workshop probably influenced Loos's choice of career as well as his understanding of and respect for natural materials. In 1887 he obtained a bricklayer's certificate, in 1887–8 he studied at the Gewerbeschule in Reichenberg and he eventually completed a building engineering course at the Gewerbeschule in Brünn. He then decided to train as an architect and in 1889 attended the Technische Hochschule, Dresden. His course was interrupted by army service and a period at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna; he returned to Dresden (1892–3) to complete his studies. In 1893 Loos left Europe for a three-year study trip to the USA, supporting himself with menial work while he visited Chicago and the World's Columbian Exposition (1893); New York and its early skyscrapers; Philadelphia; and St Louis, where Louis Sullivan's Wainwright Building had recently been completed. In addition to the contrast apparent between the classical buildings of the Exposition and the innovative work of the Chicago school, Loos no doubt also noted Sullivan's writings, including 'Ornament in Architecture' (1892), which advocated the temporary abandonment of ornament until the architect was better able to manipulate unadorned forms, and which must have influenced his own later essay 'Ornament und Verbrechen' (see below). In 1897, a year after Loos returned to Vienna, the Vienna Secession was founded (see Secession, §3), and he lost no time in establishing himself as a formidable critic of its fin-de-siècle culture, seen in the burgeoning Sezessionstil and the Gesamtkunstwerk ideal of such architects as Josef Hoffmann and Joseph Maria Olbrich. In October 1897 Loos's radical polemic began to appear in Die Zeit and turned into a spate of articles in the following year, mainly in the Neue Freie Presse. These covered a wide range of subjects, including, in addition to architecture, furnishings, dress and music, on which Loos adopted a puritanical approach. His professional design work of this period consisted mainly of interiors (mostly destr.), in which furniture was built in where possible. The best-known examples include the elegant shop interior (1898; destr.) for Goldman & Salatsch, men's clothiers, in the Graben, and the Café Museum (1899; partly destr.) opposite Olbrich's newly completed Secession Building; Loos's design for the Café Museum attained such an extreme of unornamented simplicity, with plain segmental ceiling and undecorated walls, that it became known as 'Café Nihilismus', much to Loos's satisfaction. His use of commercially available furniture, such as Thonet bentwood chairs, reflected his view that the architect's design should not inhibit the occupants' choice of everday products for comfort and convenience. At the same time Loos developed an affinity for the underplayed styles emerging from the English Arts and Crafts movement, admiring the simplification of form and unadorned surfaces of the English domestic revival of the 1890s. His idealized vision set up the English gentleman, with his simple and functional clothes and accoutrements, as a model worthy of emulation by the nouveaux riches of the German-speaking world, whose pretentious historicist stucco mansions around Vienna's Ringstrasse (then still under development) he satirized in his 'Die Potemkinsche Stadt' (Ver Sacrum, vii, 1898). The English clothes he admired were advertised in the new and short-lived periodical he published in 1903, Das Andere, the sub-title of which stated that it was for the 'introduction of western civilization into Austria', while the interior (1903; partially destr.) he designed for his own house in the Bösendorferstrasse, which is well known from published photographs, had an exposed-brickwork, metal-canopied and timber-beamed inglenook fireplace that was redolent of the English tradition. The first house designed by Loos was the Villa Karma (1904–6), Clarens, Montreux, where an existing dwelling was completely enclosed in a new one, consisting of a four-storey stuccoed house of classical simplicity, with a flat roof and recessed attic storey (completed by hugo Ehrlich). In 1908 he designed the famous interior of the American Bar (Kärntner Bar), Durchgang Kärntner, Vienna, which, with its coloured glass, marble floor and panelled ceiling, continued the '…confluence of…ideas…some drawn from Neo-classicism, some from the influence of Ruskin and Morris, which constitutes the essence of Loos's philosophy' (Summerson; see 1985 exh. cat., p. 7). 2. Mature and late work, 1910 and after. Loos's career culminated in the decade before World War I, when he built his one major urban building and a series of influential private houses. The Goldman & Salatsch Building (1910; now widely known as the Looshaus; see fig. 1), Vienna, is a plain, six-storey block of residential accommodation above a large shop. It faces the Hofburg in the Michaelerplatz. Loos admired Karl Friedrich Schinkel as the last architect he considered able to use the architectural orders without rhetoric, and in the Goldman & Salatsch Building his own classicism found expression in the marble columns of the entrance canopy and the entablature raised above the mezzanine. The interior of this building, with its marble veneers and mahogany joinery, also reveals clearly Loos's preference for the use of rich materials in place of applied ornamentation, evident as well in the character of two small shops of this period: Knize & Company (1910–13) in the Graben and the Buchhandlung Manz (1912), Kohlmarkt. It is, however, the series of private houses, beginning with the Steiner House (1910; partially altered), Weitgasse, that places Loos among the pioneers of the Modern Movement. With the Horner House (1912; partially altered), Northargasse, and the Scheu House (1912–13; restored 1971), Larochegasse, the series represents a turning point in 20th-century architecture. The Steiner House, for example, is one of the first private houses to be built in reinforced concrete, and its flat-roofed, three-storey garden front, with an abstract cubic form, smooth white surfaces and horizontal windows, prefigures the International Style by nearly a decade. More importantly perhaps, it was in these houses, especially the Scheu House, that Loos began to develop his concept of the Raumplan, the free disposition of volumes within a simple building form to give more complex interior spaces than are possible with continuous horizontal floor divisions. Loos was thus among the first to attempt the reconciliation of internal spatial complexity with prismatic external forms, which was one of the major difficulties facing architects of the early Modern Movement and was only fully resolved with Le Corbusier's development of the completely free plan, postulated as one of his 'five points of a new architecture' (1925). Of some 30 articles written by Loos during 1904–14, the most influential were undoubtedly 'Ornament und Verbrechen' and 'Architektur'. The former, which equates human cultural development with the progressive shedding of ornament, is widely dated to 1908 and used to exemplify Loos's early influence in determining the character of Modernist architecture. Recent scholarship (see Rukschio), however, suggests that a talk with this title was given to the Akademischer Verband für Literatur und Musik, Vienna, on 21 January 1910, repeated twice in 1913, but published first in French (Les Cahiers d'aujourd'hui, June 1913, and L'Esprit nouveau, 15 Nov 1920), and published in German in 1929 (Frankfurter Zeitung, 24 Oct). In this case any widespread influence, such as that sponsored by the founder-editors of L'Esprit nouveau, the poet Paul Dermée and the Purist painters Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier), seems most likely to date from about 1912. An extract only of the paper 'Architektur' (read to a meeting of architects in Berlin in October 1910) appeared in Der Sturm on 15 December 1910, and again it was first published as a whole in French (Les Cahiers d'aujourd'hui, Dec 1912). It is clearly related to the essay on ornament, begins in praise of architecture without architects, recommends a modified Arts and Crafts philosophy of craft design and ends with a panegyric on Neo-classicism and an invocation of the spirit of Schinkel to inspire 'our forthcoming generation of architects'. Loos's advocacy of simplicity stemmed from his view that since the modern bourgeois urban dweller was alienated from both the rural vernacular and the aristocratic building traditions, for most modern urban buildings it was necessary 'to do no more than design a building with technical correctness, guided by the right human approaches, and leave the right and truly contemporary form to emerge spontaneously'. There was a clear difference between his rejection of the superfluous, seen in his plain façades, and the position of the architects of the Bauhaus who adopted simplicity as a conscious aesthetic. During World War I Loos built a sugar refinery and a house for its director (1916–18; partially destr.) at Hrysovany (Rohrbach), near his birthplace, and he was subsequently given Czechoslovak citizenship (1918). In 1920 he was appointed chief architect to the housing department of the city of Vienna, which was suffering from a chronic shortage of housing. He produced a number of housing projects in which he tried to break away from the conventional courtyard plan, including the innovative Heubergsiedlung (1921; partially destr.) at the junction of Röntgengasse and Plachygasse, which incorporated stepped terraces and greenhouses. Frustrated by post-war austerity and inflation, however, he became disillusioned and resigned. He decided to move to Paris at the invitation of the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara, but he first completed the Rufer House (1922), Schliessmanngasse, Vienna, the first of the cubiform houses in which he further developed the Raumplan concept: it is one of the well-known images of the early Modern Movement, with its classical cornice and plain frieze above plain wall surfaces and an asymmetrical arrangement of windows that reflected the free planning of the spaces within. Loos's essays of 1897–1900 were published in German over a French imprint as Ins Leere gesprochen in 1921; together with the French-language publication of the more controversial articles (see above), they prepared the way for his move to Paris and a welcome from the Dadaist circle. He was in Nice when he prepared his entry for the Chicago Tribune Tower competition (1922; unexecuted), a skyscraper in the form of a giant Doric column with 22 floors of offices, which was one of the most widely published project drawings of the 20th century. Other designs of this period, all unexecuted, included that for a house on the Venice Lido (1923) for the actor Alexander Moissi, in which he took the Raumplan concept a stage further; a Grand Hotel Babylon (1923) on the Promenade des Anglais, Nice; and hotels in the Champs Elysées (1923) and Bois de Boulogne (1924), an opera house for his friend Arnold Schoenberg (1926) and a house for the dancer Josephine Baker (1928), all in Paris. A house was built, however, for Tristan Tzara (1925–6; see fig. 2) on the Avenue Junot, Montmartre, the only substantial commission he executed in Paris and regarded as a canonical example of what has been called Classical Modernism. Loos also became the correspondent in Paris for the review Die Wohnungskultur, a German version of Bytová Kultura established by Karel Teige and the Czech avant-garde with whom Loos had renewed contacts. In 1928 Loos returned to Vienna, and in a series of houses built in Vienna and Prague towards the end of his career he fully developed the Raumplan concept. The Moller House (1928), Starkfriedgasse, Vienna, and the Müller House (1928–30), Střešovice, Prague, were both houses with plain exteriors, while the Khuner House (1930), near Payerbach, Lower Austria, was more contextual, with pitched roofs, but all incorporated important contributions to the development of the free plan: the Müller House in particular is one of the earliest examples of a split-level Raumplan domestic interior, creating dynamic, interlocking spaces across levels. A collection of some 30 of Loos's essays dating from 1903, including 'Ornament und Verbrechen' and 'Architektur', was published under the title Trotzdem (1931), and it is perhaps fitting, if ironic—in view of his erstwhile bourgeois clientele—that Loos's last works were unglamorous workers' houses, including the simple terraces of the Arbeitsiedlung (1932; partially destr.), Babi bei Nachod, Czechoslovakia, and the simple, semi-detached houses of the Werkbundsiedlung exhibition (1932) at Woinovichgasse, Vienna. (Grove Art Online accessed 2007-10-23)

International Style (modern European architecture style)

Modernist

houses

houses

architecture (object genre)

architecture

Vienna, Austria

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© Adolf Loos

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