ABOUT LOOS

Adolf Loos was born in Brunn, Czechoslovakia in 1870. His studies at the Royal and Imperial State Technical College in Rechenberg, Bohemia were cut short by a two year stint in the army. After he attended the College of Technology in Dresden for three years, he worked in the U.S. as a mason, a floor-layer and a dish-washer. He eventually obtained a job with the architect Carl Mayreder and in 1897 he established his own practice. He taught for several years throughout Europe, but returned to practice in Vienna in 1928. Adolf Loos gained greater notoriety for his writings than for his buildings. Loos wanted an intelligently established building method supported by reason. He believed that everything that could not be justified on rational grounds was superfluous and should be eliminated. Loos recommended pure forms for economy and effectiveness. He rarely considered how this "effectiveness" could correspond to rational human needs Austrian architect whose planning of private residences strongly influenced European Modernist architects after World War I. Frank Lloyd Wright credited Loos with doing for European architecture what Wright was doing in the United States. To Adolf Loos, the lack of ornament in architecture was a sign of spiritual strength. Adolf Loos referred to the opposite, excessive ornamentation, as criminal - not for abstract moral reasons, but because of the economics of labor and wasted materials in modern industrial civilization. Adolf Loos argued that because ornament was no longer an important manifestation of culture, the worker dedicated to its production could not be paid a fair price for his labor.
"The evolution of culture is synonymous with removing decoration from utilitarian objects." And for architecture Adolf Loos predicted: "Soon the city streets will shine like white walls!". The following year Adolf Loos hoped to realize his ideas by building the new head office of

gentlemen's tailors Goldman & Salatsch. By July 1910 the main faade of the "Loos house" was smooth, white and bereft of adornment, to the horror of the Viennese public. An injunction caused building to cease at that point; construction would not resume until 1912, when Adolf Loos declared himself willing to add bronze window boxes for flowers to the windows.

The Looshaus in Vienna (also known as the Goldman & Salatsch Building) is regarded as one of the most important structures built in the Wiener Moderne. The building marks the rejection of historicism, as well as the ornaments used by the Wiener Secession. Adolf Loos received the assignment in 1909, and the building was finished in 1910. Upon opening, its appearance shocked Vienna's citizens, since their overall taste was still very much historically oriented. Because of the lack of ornaments on the faade, people called it the 'house without eyebrows'.

Loos was opposed to both Art Nouveau and Beaux-Arts historicism, and as early as 1898 he announced his intention to avoid the use of unnecessary ornament. His first building, the Villa Karma, Clarens, near Montreux, Switz. (190406), was notable for its geometric simplicity. It was followed by the Steiner House, Vienna (1910), which has been referred to by some architectural historians as the first completely modern dwelling; the main (rear) facade is a symmetrical, skillfully balanced composition of rectangles.
point of contention decried by Adolf Loos was the masking of the true nature and beauty of materials by useless and indecent ornament. In his 1898 essay entitled "Principles of Building," Adolf Loos wrote that the true vocabulary of architecture lies in the materials themselves, and that a building should remain "dumb" on the outside. In his own work, Adolf Loos contrasted austere facades with lavish interiors. Much like Mies van der Rohe, Adolf Loos arrived at the reduction of architecture to a purely technical tautology that emphasized the simple assemblage of materials. This article was followed by the 1910 essay entitled "Architecture," in which Adolf Loos explained important contradictions in design: between the interior and the exterior, the monument and the house, and art works and objects of function. To Adolf Loos, the house did not belong to art because the house must please everyone, unlike a work of art, which does not need to please anyone.

This dwelling was built for Joseph and Marie Rufer. It is considered by critics as the first built house that portrays in its totality Loos' concept of Raumplan regarding the interior spatial organization of the building. The house has the shape of a cube with the external walls serving as a structural shell. These four bearing walls contain the house within a small area (just 10x10 meters). At the center of the volume, a column articulates the spaces under the Raumplan logic and also conceals the plumbing for the water and heating. The Raumplan also affects the exterior since the elevations are in part a reflection of the interior organization; however, in order to achieve a balanced composition Loos also gave attention to the resulting contrast between the naked white walls and the dark patches of the windows. Although it can be said that the surfaces of the house are completely bare, with even the window frames stripped of any superfluous parts, there are three other elements of the faade that remain intriguing. Loos included in the elevations a squashed frieze and a cornice to top the cubic volume. The cornice projects out from the faade and slightly covers the view of the frieze, which apart from having an extremely elongated proportion and being almost imperceptible as an element in the faade

remains completely blank. The third element is a complement to the previous two, a rectangular molding depicting a Parthenon frieze and positioned low on the street front. It is a piece that completes the balance of the elevations but it is also an ornament, a fragment of classical work. Some critics have stated that this frieze not only balances the formal composition between voids and surface but also balances the purist abstraction of the cube with the figurative. In a way it also places the house and its ideals into the wider picture of the history of western architecture and argues in favor of a classical image of Loos instead of the architect as a radical functionalist. This seemingly straightforward house remains rich in subtle complexities that still challenge our understanding of space.

Influences: Adolf Loos was impressed by the efficiency of American architecture, and he admired the work of Louis Sullivan In 1896, returned to Vienna and worked for architect Carl Mayreder In 1898, Loos opened his own practice in Vienna and became friends with philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, expressionist composer Arnold Schnberg, satirist Karl Kraus, and other free-thinkers.

Important Buildings: 1910: 1910: 1922: 1928: 1929: Steiner House, Vienna Goldman & Salatsch Building, Vienna Rufer House, Vienna Villa Mller, Prague Khuner Villa, Kreuzberg, Austria

Architectural Theory: Adolf Loos believed that reason should determine the way we build, and he opposed the decorative Art Nouveau movement. In Ornament & Crime (compare prices) and other essays, Loos described the suppression of decoration as necessary for regulating passion. Stylistic Features: Homes designed by Adolf Loos featured: Straight lines Clear planar walls and windows Clean curves Raumplan ("plan of volumes") system of contiguous, merging spaces Each room on a different level, with floors and ceilings set at different heights

The Villa Mller is, in Loos's own view, his best application of his spatial planning or "Raumplan":

My architecture is not conceived by drawings, but by spaces. I do not draw plans, facades or sections... For me, the ground floor, first floor do not exist... There are only interconnected continual spaces, rooms, halls, terraces... Each space needs a different height... These spaces are connected so that ascent and descent are not only unnoticeable, but at the same time functional.

Sites
http://www.greatbuildings.com/architects/Adolf_Loos.html http://www.adolf-loos.com/ http://www.galinsky.com/buildings/villamueller/index.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Loos#Architectural_theory http://www.mimoa.eu/projects/Austria/Vienna/Looshaus http://architecture.about.com/od/greatarchitects/p/loos.htm http://www.galinsky.com/buildings/rufer/index.htm http://architect.architecture.sk/adolf-loos-architect/adolf-loos-architect.php http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/347815/Adolf-Loos