Adolf Loos – opulent rationalist, ornate minimalist

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Not an easy read, but ‘the simplicity and beauty of the presentation’ of Coppa’s book may win you over

Adolf Loos by Alessandra Coppa

Adolf Loos is an enormously complicated figure: prescient, bold, and full of paradoxes that make him difficult to classify and his work difficult to describe in summary terms. Some people place him among the pantheon of the world’s greatest ‘moderns’, along with Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius although he was not a ‘modernist’ in any traditional sense.

Loos is often described as a Viennese architect. He was born in 1870 in Brünn (Brno), north of Vienna, in what was then the Austrian-Hungarian empire. His father was a sculptor and stonecutter who died while Loos was only nine years old. His influence is debated as Loos is known partly for the rich use of stone especially marble cladding, in his interiors, and it is easy to draw a connection, however tenuous. 

From 1884 Loos studied various disciplines in Brünn, but turned eventually to architecture after completing his education at the National School of Arts and Crafts (1889) and a stint in Dresden, 1892. He travelled to the United States (1893) where he lived and worked for three years, returning to Vienna in 1896. Between 1896 and 1906 his reputation was largely built on speaking engagements in many cities throughout Europe, where he advertised his ideas and his architectural work. In addition, he published many essays as well as other writings, but is most well known for Das Andere (The Other), Ornament and Crime, and Spoken into the Void:  collections of his essays published long after his reputation was solidly established. By 1906 Loos was known as a polemicist and his work considered important both as a social and architectural critic and interior designer. He denied any standing as an architect per se.

In hisbuildings we see stripped-down exteriors but also rich, marble finishes in domestic interiors, and the juxtaposition of the classical or neo-classical with local building styles. His interior architecture has been called ‘disjunctive’, not being fully classical, minimalistic, or vernacular. The primary strength of this book is its photographs (100 in colour), excellent throughout, and their presentation. The first 20 pages display photographs beginning with one of Adolf Loos’ most well-known buildings, the Michaelerplatz (‘Looshaus’) in Vienna, built 1909–11, followed by the ‘Knizes’ clothiers (1910), and a housing project the ‘Winarsky Hof’, built 1924–5. These three projects help to demonstrate the range of Loos’ work. The scale of the pictures lends an impact not found in books with smaller pages – this book is 31.5 cm x 24cm. The pictures are cropped in a way that gives the viewer a sense of a room.

Coppa’s analyses of the buildings are, thankfully, straightforwardly written and redeem a somewhat impenetrable Introduction. She also writes well on Loos’ ideas in a chapter subdivided into subject headings:   ‘Ornament, utility and tradition’, ‘Architecture and Art’, ‘Design and Architecture’, ‘The tradition of the new’, ‘The sensory nature of materials’, ‘The principle of cladding’, ‘Architecture and Fashion’, ‘Beauty’ and ‘Ornament and Crime’. These are the sorts of topic commonly associated with Loos.

Neither this complex architect’s theory or built works are easy to write about succinctly but I wish the author had made clearer for the reader, for example, the tension between Loos’ reputation for minimalism and rationalism, on the one hand, and the eclectic and opulent nature of his interiors, on the other. The book seems to associate Loos with the modernists because he is described as a ‘Rationalist’ with a capital ‘R’, leading the reader to align him with Mies van der Rohe or Le Corbusier.

Statements such as: ‘works founded on Rationalist thinking, consisting of pure geometric forms, dictated by the functional-constructive, tectonic needs of the context’, aren’t helpful, not to mention misleading when they stand on their own. Perhaps Coppa wanted to say that Loos’ understanding of rationalism was developed independently of the modern movement and adjusted to the needs of each site and client for whom he worked. His was a rationalism with a small ‘r’. Another author, Benedetto Gravagnuolo, wrote on Loos:

Clearly the rationality of Loos is … conceived primarily as a practical tool, a simple procedure for control of the project. There is nothing ascetic, still less dogmatic, about it. It is never raised to the level of a system.

Loos, himself, wrote: ‘Straight lines, straight angles: this is how an artisan works who is thinking about nothing but the finality of his work, his material, his tool...’  This is ‘rationalism’ as a process. Regarding the ornament that Loos famously condemned (‘Ornament and Crime’), it is important to point out that he was not against decoration and, further, drew a clear distinction between ornament, decoration, and a sense of the individual’s right to inhabit his own space with all their own possessions, in whatever bad taste. Thus, Loos wasn’t a purist either.  Rooms in private residences incorporated decoration in the form of rich materials used, as well as applied ornament in certain cases, while ultimately also including personal possessions not in any way coordinated with the designer’s scheme. Thus, the idea of inhabiting was extremely important to Loos. This is not mentioned here.

Gravagnuolo points to some of the complication inherent in discussing Loos’ work:  the oppositions, contradictions, and optical illusions:

The most fascinating aspect of Loos’ architecture lies in the simultaneous and contradictory presence of a thin irrational vein that is tightly bound by the rigid links of rational composition. It can make use, for example, of the unpredictability of optical illusions and visual trickery that is typical of the interiors of Loos’ houses. In short, rationality, in Loos, is never brought down to the level of a fanatical functionalism.

Coppa does makes clear that Loos  did not oppose historical (classical) references in his work and did not find them antithetical to modernism, indeed sought them out as the foundation for a new modernism: this would be ‘the tradition of the new’ (and a basis for his rationalism). Yet she doesn’t elucidate how this, combined with the stripping of superfluous ornamental detail, differs from the modernism of Loos’ purist contemporaries – whose work was concerned with simplification and geometries as well. While Loos praised the machine, and used technology to achieve precision, he did not make technology – a preoccupation of the ‘Moderns’ – a feature of his architecture or interiors. Technology is nowhere to be seen in his work.

If you are new to Adolf Loos start by reading the biographies of the buildings and the final section of the book called ‘Ideas’ first; and then the purpose of the photographs and this monograph may make some sense to you. The pictures, large and informative, inform the biographies that accompany the analyses of individual buildings. Problems develop when the author,  an architectural historian (formerly at the Polytechnic of Milan/DiAP Politenico di Milano), attempts in the Introduction to give us an overview of Loos’ body of work, his theory, and his place in history.  The introductory material, heavily based on the work of her colleagues, Benedetto Gravagnuolo and Aldo Rossi, is difficult to follow.

In the end one has to ask of any book on Adolf Loos what it contributes that the others, preceding it, do not, for there are a number of recent publications on the architect. Why another book on Loos? What does the author have to offer the reader that other authors, writing in English, have not already? The answer, in this case, is the simplicity and beauty of the presentation itself; the large scale of the colour photos, and the fact that the book, in the end, will yield an introduction to Loos’ work if the reader perseveres.

Adolf Loos  by Alessandra Coppa is published by 24 Ore Cultura, 2013. 125 pp. 100 colour illus. ISBN: 9788866481485