Adolf
Loos
Loos' "Building in the Stadtpark Area"
“I meet the famous modern interior designer
X in the street.
Good afternoon, I say, I saw one of your flats
yesterday.
Oh yes—which one?
The one belonging to Dr. Y.
What! The
one belonging to Dr. Y? For goodness
sake, don’t look at that rubbish, I did that three years ago.
You don’t say! I have always thought there was a basic difference between
us, dear colleague. Now I see
that it is only a time difference. A
time difference that can be expressed in years. Three years! That
is, I maintained even then that it was rubbish- and it has taken you until
today.”
Adolf Loos
[1]
Adolf
Loos took the notion of modernism to a new level, looking to create an entirely
new form of architecture, and one which strictly rejected any form of decoration.
Whereas Wagner,
Hoffman and Olbrich still saw a relationship between architecture and artistic expression,
Loos believed that "we shall have an architecture for our time only when
the mendacious slogan, ‘applied art’, is banished from the vocabulary
of nations."
[2]
A powerful thinker who worked to expose the contradictions
of contemporary theory, Loos was an architect who became more famous for his
ideas than for his buildings. Like
Wagner, Olbrich, and Hoffman, Loos believed that reason should determine the
way to build, but Loos opposed the decorative Jugendstil movement and the work of the Secessionists, consistently resisting any form of ornamentation
in architecture.
Adolf Loos thought that the so-called modern architects of his time were not really
questioning the fundamental forms of architecture, as they intended, but were
simply substituting one style for another. He agreed with other critics of the Secessionists in that their
attempt to replace Viennese eclecticism was still a superficial system of ornamentation
[3]
. Loos was unique, however, in the reasoning
behind his critique: his was
based on a rejection of the entire concept of art when applied to the design of everyday
objects or architecture. Loos
had the same goal as his contemporaries:
to create an architectural language that represented their time. But Loos' way of thinking was based in
a different logic. He believed
that examples of a truly modern approach already existed, but not where other
architects were looking- in industrial products without any artistic pretensions:
All those trades which have managed to keep this superfluous
creature [the artist] out of their workshops are at present at the peak of
their ability… their products capture the style of our time so well
that we do not even look on them as having style. They have become entwined with out thoughts and feelings. Our carriage constructions, our glasses,
our silver cigarette cases, our jewelry, our clothes—they are all modern.
[4]
Loos first became known through his controversial articles, which attacked
both Vienna’s middle-class culture and the avant-garde culture, including
the "modern" architects of his time, that tried to surpass it. But it was an essay of his, "Ornament
and Crime", written in 1908, that eventually turned him into the "father
figure"of the 1920's Modern Movement
[5]
. In his essay, Loos stated that all ornament
should be eliminated from objects and architecture, in direct opposition to
the Secession and the Judendstil movement. He felt that human culture had evolved to a point where decoration
was no longer required. The ornamentation
of useful objects represented "wasted material"and "wasted
capital". And thus, "the
evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornamentation of everyday
use."
[6]
Loos' arguments were demonstrated in his
work. Unlike his contemporaries,
Loos felt that walls were the domain of the architect, and that furniture
belonged to the craftsman. Loos
used natural materials such as marble or wood, and the smooth, unadorned surfaces
defined the interior spaces. The villas he designed were cubes without ornamentation, and
were characterized by an emphasis on the individual spatial volume of the
rooms, rather than a more traditional plan, where each of the decorated rooms
occur within a predetermined volume.
For Loos, the search (by his contemporaries) for an architectural style
that represented its time was still based on a nostalgia for the pre-industrial
"organic"society. The conscious attempt to create a style for its time, Loos
continued, was doomed to fail: "No
one has tried to put his podgy finger into the turning wheel of time without
having his hand torn off."
[7]
Loos believed that true modernism existed
in the industrial nature of his time, freeing the artist to create pure forms
of art, and the architect to make a more functional, purposeful work.