“Throughout his life Adolf Loos raised his eloquent voice against the squandering of fine materials, frivolous ornamentation and unnecessary embellishments. His admirers consider him to be the inspiration for all modern architecture. Yet, few are acquainted with his amusing, incisive, critical and philosophical literary work reflecting on applied design and the essence of clothing in fin de siècle Vienna. Adolf Loos often had a radical, yet innovative outlook on life that made him such a nuisance for many of his contemporaries. His provocative musings on many subjects portray him as a man of varied interests and intellectual refinement as well as possessing a keen sense of style, which still has value today. For the first time the Loos Dress Code is available in English. Included is a short social/historical look as the birth of Modernism in Adolf Loos Vienna.”
Learning to Dwell:
Adolf Loos in the Czech Lands – review
Riba, London
Rowan Moore
Sunday 20 February
2011 00.03 GMT
"The naked
woman," said the architect Adolf Loos, "is unattractive to
man." It is one of the more striking statements in the history
of architectural writing, and one that may not seem to have much to
do with architecture, but it is part of a theory that has done much
to shape the buildings of the past 100 years. If you have eaten in a
restaurant or visited a hotel describing itself as "minimalist",
or ever been struck by the lack of ornament on any modernist
building, you will have witnessed the after-effects of this strange
thought. According to a 1930s critic: "There lives not one
single architect who does not carry within himself a bit of Loos."
Women, argued Loos,
have to dress and ornament themselves to appeal to "man's sickly
sensuality". They have to wear impractical things such as long
skirts that stress their decorative role. It would be much better if
both men and women wore plain, well-made clothes like the English
suits that he especially liked. Ornament, he famously said, is linked
to degeneracy and crime and should be removed from objects of daily
use: not just clothes, but furniture and buildings.
Loos is usually
described as Austrian, but he grew up in the town of Brno, then part
of the Hapsburg empire, now in the Czech Republic. Some of his best
works are in that country, in Brno, Prague and Plzen. This week, an
exhibition opens at the Royal Institute of British Architects that,
originating in Prague, seeks to reclaim Loos for his homeland. It
should also, distributed across several floors of Riba's
headquarters, be a good introduction to the work of this astonishing
man.
It will show the
houses and apartments that Loos designed in the 1920s for prosperous
bourgeoisie of a country, Czechoslovakia, minted after the Great War
by the Treaty of Versailles. He built for a paediatrician, a
manufacturer of screws and another of wire, a chemist serving the
brewing industry and the hugely successful building contractor
František Müller. These were people keen to distance themselves
from the past, but also to embrace high culture, and their homes
tended to be furnished with pianos and art.
The exteriors of the
houses are as plain as Loos said they should be. The house he built
for Müller, on a steep slope facing towards Prague Castle, is
startlingly white and cubic. Villa Müller's interiors, however, are
far from being puritanical boxes. They are lush with oak, flaming
mahogany, poplar and elm, and marbles with evocative names:
cipollino, with layered patterns like the inside of an onion, and
fantastico, with dazzling patterns of black on white. He would use
yellow-gold silk for curtains and lampshades and, when it suited, the
newest materials of his time, with their own exotic brand names:
Xylonite, linoleum, Salubra wallpaper and Duco automative paint that
gave the finish of a new car.
He loved mirrors,
using them to multiply rooms and dissolve their boundaries, and
played games with the veining of marbles. In one convulsive music
room, as in a gestalt test, you can read monsters and pudenda into
the symmetrical patterns of matched fantastico panels. His shapes are
severe, almost all straight-lined and right-angled, but they are full
of constrained sensuality. Economy was not the purpose – one of his
assistants said that you could build "a very nice detached
house" for the cost of one of his rooms. These rich rooms are in
fact consistent with Loos's theories of ornament, as they use the
inherent patterns of natural materials rather than decoration
contrived by man.
He believed that the
materials of a room should match its use and mood, with marble in
more public places and wood in more intimate rooms, or pale maple in
a woman's dressing room and oak in a man's. The dimensions, including
height, should also be varied to suit each room, with the result that
his houses became three-dimensional jigsaws of interlocking spaces,
with many floor and ceiling levels, connected by short flights of
steps and crisscrossed by views from one to the other.
Loos was born in
1870 and died in 1933, lived in Vienna at the time of Freud, and
makes an easy subject for amateur analysis. His father was a
stonemason and his happy early memories of playing in his workshop
were cut short at the age of nine when his father died. His mother
was strict and he escaped her to join the army as early as possible,
only to contract syphilis. She then cut him off, in return for paying
for his fare for his three-year trip to the United States.
He married three
times, had a long-term mistress, and towards the end of his life he
was accused of paedophilia. He had a particular penchant for
actresses and dancers. As described in a new book by Anne Anlin
Cheng, Second Skin (Oxford University Press), he was fascinated by
Josephine Baker. On the basis of a slight acquaintance, he
volunteered to design her a house, never built, whose main features
were a glass-walled swimming pool surrounded by corridors for viewing
her body at exercise, and an exterior in vibrant black-and-white
stripes which may have represented his wish to mingle his European
restraint with her African-American energy.
He was, in other
words, a sensualist, of a possibly twisted kind. His houses, with
their blank, mask-like outsides and their intricate,
lush-but-disciplined interiors, make perfect emblems of his
well-dressed outer self and his complex inner self. Both buildings
and writings express a singular, tortured personality, with strange
views on desire, yet had a general influence. Architects such as Mies
van der Rohe and Le Corbusier learned plainness and controlled luxury
from him ("Whatever is good in Le Corbusier's work, he learned
from Loos," said Loos, half-ironically.) Mies and Corb were then
the dominant influences on architecture for two generations.
His interiors are
inward-looking, mesmerising, sometimes a little creepy. There is an
air of fragility or tragedy about them, reinforced by later events.
His many Jewish clients were forced out of their marbled nests into
exile or camps. In 1945, the commanding officer of the local
Wehrmacht shot himself in the flat with the convulsive music room,
which had been appropriated as headquarters. Old Müller was
dispossessed of his fortune by the postwar Communist regime, but
allowed to stay on in the house, in whose boiler room he would
eventually be found dead; he had operated the equipment wrongly,
whether accidentally or on purpose, and poisoned himself with fumes.
Müller's wife,
Milada Müllerová, stayed on, lodged in the recesses of the house,
and fought with the authorities to stop them wrecking it. Thanks to
her, it survived and is now restored, opened to the public, and one
of the more compelling of the many compelling sights of Prague.
Adolf Loos
1870-1933
Key buildings
Café Museum (1899)
Kärntner Bar (1908)
Goldman &
Salatsch (1910)
Villa Müller (1928)
Key texts
Potemkin City (1898)
Architecture (1910)
Ornament and Crime
(1913)
 |
‘The evolution of
culture is synonymous with the removal of ornamentation from objects
of everyday use’
|
Adolf
Loos (1870-1933)
8
OCTOBER, 2013BY PAUL DAVIES
Controversial
in both private and professional circles, the life and work of Loos
are reviewed by Paul Davies
Adolf Loos was
Moravian. His father, a stonemason, died when he was nine. His mother
was domineering. He caught syphilis while in a brothel with his
godfather at 21. His mother cut him off in return for passage to the
USA, where he spent three years, among other things, happily washing
dishes.
Originally from
Brno, he returned to the intellectual café society of Vienna in
1894, a clan righteously circumspect in believing in almost anything.
He especially fell in with Karl Kraus and poetic muse Peter Altenberg
and out with Viennese architects; publishing witty, sarcastic pieces
satirising the Secession, Germany’s bad plumbing, propensity for
dressing up and other bad habits. Fashion, including underwear, is a
prominent subject, but it was not an unusual one for the time, as the
strictures and hypocrisy of the Habsburg Monarchy and its corsetry
were progressively undone. Collected as ‘Spoken Into The Void’,
Loos’s essays culminated in Ornament and Crime (1908) that
precipitously stated: ‘the lower the culture, the more apparent the
ornament’.
He began
architecture with his own apartment in 1903, then with a succession
of rooms, shopfronts, bars and eventually whole houses (Steiner
House, 1910) for clients mirroring his interest in Gemütlichkeit or
cosiness. The later houses have a strikingly modern pose (but plenty
earlier do not) and even though he was only seven years older than
Gropius and Mies, it made a big difference to die in 1933 rather than
1969. Loos was eclipsed as a more energetic Modernism progressed. It
didn’t help that Loos had little interest in saving the world; that
his orientation was inverted, practically and psychologically, to the
interior; and that he was ideologically inappropriate.
For instance Loos
had no interest in the ‘honest’ expression of structure; only the
appropriate use of material. For him architecture was like dressing,
and one should be well dressed. For other members of the Modern
Movement such an analogy would assume an enthusiasm for striptease.
And his horizons were modest. He did grapple with larger projects
(various hotels in particular, some housing) but they remain
unappreciated. He had a tendency to ziggurat, or to plainly terrace,
or to do both at the same time. He took, then left, his position as
chief architect of the housing department of Vienna the same year
(1922). Neither was he interested in teams or groups, and there are
no disciples to speak of, just those he influenced. He hence becomes
interesting as much for what he wasn’t as what he was, unconnected
while thoroughly linked-in, with a process rather his own.
For
Loos architecture was like dressing, and one should be well dressed.
For other members of the Modern Movement such an analogy would assume
an enthusiasm for striptease
This internalisation
has made him most attractive to the more literary minded
Postmodernists. Aldo Rossi saw him as a template for Musil’s The
Man without Qualities and in the backlash against technocratic
utopia, rediscovered his respect for craftsmanship and his wit;
especially admiring his giant Doric chess piece for the Chicago
Tribune (1923) notable for its singular and conspicuous label on the
plan: ‘Pipes’. Loos’s lack of interest in redemptive urban
planning served him well with those who now reviled it. Frampton
embedded him in the problematics of Wittgenstein, emphasising his
laconic analysis of what architecture was and what it could do; which
was not much.
However, his
Raumplan, the imagining of rooms as wholes, contained within rigid,
blank forms − of which the Müller House (Prague 1930) is exemplary
− still breeds speculation. The austerity is understandable (the
daring Goldman & Salatsch store of 1910 so infuriated Emperor
Franz Josef that he demanded his curtains be permanently drawn
against it) but it is Loos’s interior comforts that are more
troubling.
He married three
times, all younger women, the last dramatically so, and was involved
in two trials regarding child pornography and molestation (1905 and
1928). One person’s comfort might be another’s claustrophobia.
The interiors are now considered voyeuristic (Colomina), a sexualised
reading circumstantially reinforced when we compare the Raumplan with
the free plan.
This reading is
helped by scrutiny of his unbuilt project for Josephine Baker’s
Parisian residence (1927) where he put the exotic dancer in a fish
tank, and by his bedroom for his first wife Lina, also a dancer,
which seems to have been lined in fur. Meanwhile Loos enjoyed an
emphatic but voyeuristic interest in Josephine Baker while Le
Corbusier enjoyed an equally emphatic but intimate one. Further his
(so-called) elephant trunk side table legs look more like eight
female dancers’ legs balanced on tiptoe and his lounge chair
demonstrates that perhaps the only way he found peace was to stare at
the ceiling.
His necessary
restraint showed itself in fastidiousness. He was exacting of
craftsmen on the building site, and enjoyed the fact that his
interiors rarely photographed well, but that they had to be
experienced with ownership.
His method was
intimate rather than professional. He considered practising
architecture no better than washing the dishes, he thought the best
definition of an architect a bricklayer who spoke Latin, believed
so-called ‘Architecture’ generally despoiled the landscape,
considered the only venue for art in architecture to be the tomb and
the monument, and the best place for the architect invisible. He
didn’t even have a bank account. Dressing so well, he chalked up
debts with his outfitters, Goldman & Salatsch, and repaid them
with schemes culminating in the famous store.
Central to the
appreciation of Loos is, problematically, good taste. Not many people
go out of their way to buy a couple of Josef Hoffmann’s black wine
glasses and submit them by post to Gustav Pazaurek’s official
‘Cabinet of Bad Taste’, but Loos did. However, black wine glasses
are distasteful and life with Loos was not unpalatable. His last
wife, Claire Beck Loos, revered him, indeed, in one of the strangest
examples of potential grooming; she was raised in one of Loos’s
early rooms. However, she left him, and wrote the touching A Private
Portrait (just republished in English), a memoir of their itinerant
later years in various straits in hotels along the Côte d’Azur,
with Loos now deaf, and with luggage and dogs, like something out of
EM Forster or Somerset Maugham.
His proclivities may
not have been considered so offensive by his set. Peter Altenberg
also had a thing for young girls. Meanwhile all bourgeois mores were
repugnant to polemicist Karl Kraus and Dadaist Tristan Tzara, who
remained a client, and for whom Loos built an extraordinary and
uniquely uncomfortable house in Paris in 1926.
There are obviously
many sides to Loos, many paradoxes; in photographs he rarely looks
the same way twice. He appeals to the detective, that most postmodern
of professions. The theorists ponder the psychology, but commercial
architects have found much inspiration in his luxurious use of
materials, and non-commercial ones wonder at his ingenious use of
space, and in both cases Loos can become far more practically useful
than Le Corbusier or Mies. Every architect can have the dream to do
an American Bar as good as The Kärntner, even if it’s for
Starbucks. As my wife said perusing Roberto Schezen’s photographs:
‘It looks so much better than modern architecture!
’
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