The buildings and writings of Adolf Loos (1870–1933) are currently regarded in the cultural sphere—rightly or wrongly—as exemplary of early modern iconoclasm: a denial of art in the strict sense, if not altogether nihilistic, accompanied by a Dadaist form of anti-architecture. Despite my longstanding interest in Duchamp, I have always felt that Loos was something more than merely the Duchamp of architecture—but why do I say this? Considering certain aspects of his writings, the present book offers a kind of answer: not that Loos was no iconoclast, but that his was the playful and deliberate iconoclasm of a believer in the high art of architecture. Contrary to the conventional reading of Loos as a mere polemicist—the notion that part of architectural history probably found its way to modernism only through a witty critic rather than through building and advancing it—the thematic essays that follow proceed from the premise that Loos, as an inquirer, belongs to the history of art as much as any other modern artist. Kenneth Frampton offers a doubly negative and uniquely qualified response when he speaks of the "decline of classical aesthetics" at the hands of "positive and negative avant-gardes," and sometimes with startling tenacity of "the anti-painting painting of Duchamp or the anti-architecture architecture of Adolf Loos." He notes how Loos, in his 1910 essay "Architecture," draws a distinction between architecture and art, through "an oscillation between the description of the house as conservatism, and the work of art, art, as insurgency"—only to conclude "with this beautiful and ironic passage": "And thus man loves his house and hates art." There is indeed irony here, but it bears no hostility toward art. "Architecture" also pays homage to the Romantic classicist of several centuries past, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, and though Loos in 1910 vies with Schinkel in grandeur, his honest artistry has been sufficiently forgotten—despite the cultural fame of his final days—to rightly deserve, a century later, to be part of his unforgettable tribute to Schinkel: "Let the radiance of this towering figure shine upon the next generation of architects!" It scarcely matters that Loos never had the opportunity to design the public buildings that would have justified this tribute in his mind; his informal modern formalism was a lesson that
Adolf Loos, who is considered one of the most important founders of modern architecture, was a cultural star from the very outset. His works epitomize the turn-of-the-century generation, torn between the traditional culture of the nineteenth century and the innovative modernism of the twentieth. His essay "Ornament and Crime" equated excessive ornamentation with tattooing, reminding modern Europeans that they ought to be wiser. Yet the rejection of ornament was meant to reveal good taste; and regarding the denial of architecture as a fine art, more attention has been paid to the surface of Loos's words—he being a relentless polemicist. Masheck, without normalizing Loos's sharp-edged radicalism, argues that he affirmed authentic tradition, utility, even comfort—as a quasi-modern baptismal font—while attacking the Viennese Secessionist notion of "applied art," which was indulgently decorative. The Loos that Masheck portrays is not so much an anti-architect as "an artist-architect who is rebellious, yet in a coherent way conventional." This book is a revisionist reading of a founding and perennially beloved modernist.
Adolf Loos, Müller Villa, Prague, rear facade
was needed, and perhaps will be needed once more. In New York, Loos had to wash dishes to earn pocket money and sometimes slept in a public youth hostel: his exertions during this period, had they been solely for the sake of speaking wittily in short phrases—in the art of the bon mot—what a waste that would have been. No, Loos's sarcasm never overcame his wit at its best, nor did his wit overcome his intelligence. After Otto Wagner, the great elder Viennese master of the previous generation who ushered in modernism at the dawn of the twentieth century, Loos carried the work forward as much as any other architect. The relatively young man who took the name Le Corbusier was one whose art was influenced by this so-called non-artist. Loos demonstrated how the end of the formal academic tradition, far from bringing to a close what deserved to be called art, might give modern architecture the chance to inherit a truth about the old tradition that was worthy of survival. Philosophically, his skeptical attitude and straightforward avoidance of complicating matters sometimes links Loos to the resolute logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, which sought to purge modern life of the supposed impurity of metaphysics. The extreme architectural functionalism that Loos made possible—though he himself was never confined to it—was similarly accepted as a truth deemed worthy only of those powerful enough to live without any values whatsoever. Yet the more closely we examine the most radical aspects of Loos's architecture, the less he appears a standard functionalist. After all, he seems less akin to a logical positivist like Rudolf Carnap and more akin to Wittgenstein, who in fact distanced himself from the Vienna Circle even though he had made its formation possible. Even where Loos strikingly declares that at the very least one's private home should not be the subject of art—a dangerous thought that Nietzsche too had in mind, to say nothing of Loos's friend Karl Kraus—he had not lost his masterful control of meaning in the role of ironist. The enduring caricature of Loos was inevitably fueled by the pleasure he took in playing with horrifying avant-gardism: the very attitude that his most famous "real" text, "Ornament and Crime," pursued, overshadowing everything else. What disturbs modernists without consoling conservatives is how his lucid radicalism enabled the continuation of a kind of sacred classical essence "without exemplary works"—that is, in practice, within his own small school, entirely independent of any pedagogical system. Which must be why less discerning modernists and more anxious conservatives overlook
major instances in which Loos came close to the center of gravity of conventional fine-art architecture—yet clearly on his own, and inevitably by seemingly unconventional standards. Thus the early renovation of Villa Karma, near Montreux in Switzerland, is a masterpiece of the palatial and aristocratic Renaissance type—in 1904–06, a modernist equivalent of the Medici villa by Giuliano da Sangallo at Poggio a Caiano, dating from the early 1480s—how dare he! Anyone who places the two works side by side can compile an astonishing list of resemblances. Here and now, the details hardly matter: what matters is that if a house so closely resembles a great work of architectural art—the supposedly rejected Loosian category—then perhaps the burden of proving it is not art does not rest on the artist, whether ironist or not. The more one considers the historical artistic latency of his work, the less convincing becomes the prevailing cliché of Adolf Loos as mere anti-artist. The issue relates partly to the understandable development of "positivist" anti-aesthetic thought, in a more extreme form than anything originating from Le Corbusier (who himself always valued the French classical tradition), especially in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere in Central Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. Yet although the Czech-born Viennese Loos ultimately came to be regarded as a pioneer of functionalism, he was never prepared to reduce architecture to the certainty of utilitarian functionalism. His original concept of the Raumplan ("spatial plan"), while architecturally brilliant, is clearly not very practical—including the complexity and expense of a collaborating engineer, solely so that floor levels may occur on discontinuous planes, and the mounting complexity of any subsequent modification in response to new needs: hardly consonant with the cost-efficiency conventionally claimed by functionalism. Comparing Loos's buildings with those of entirely functionalist Czech architects reveals Loos's art—which the otherwise grateful functionalists apparently shunned. And still there are those who ought to know better, viewing Loos's de-ornamented simplicity as the simple starting point of all-purpose "Bauhaus functionalism" in architecture. As becomes clear at the conclusion of a reconsideration of Loos as artist, for further conclusions—from Loos as functionalist first, to Loos as the grandfather of "minimalism," which we now know is not the finest sculpture but merely a cold, dry, fashionable decorative style-weariness in the repressively solid "luxury" architecture and design of the 1960s and 1970s—that could expose Loos's ignorance, as though all the "degree zeros" of the entire 2000s were one and the same.