A background to Loos' ideas...
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| Adolf Loos (10 Dec 1870 – 23 Aug 1933) |
Adolf Loos certainly knew what he did not like.
Adolf Loos referred to Vienna as ‘The Potemkin City’; a place where culture and identity was hidden beneath a mask of decorative facades. He argued that the newly built Ringstrasse, a boulevarde lined with elaborate buildings, did not represent his home city in its entirety. It was merely designed to ‘show off’ Vienna’s wealth and sophistication.
Loos also rejected the Vienna Secession, a movement to steer art and architecture away from conservative historicism. Its philosophy proclaimed “To every age it’s art and to art it’s freedom” but for Loos, this movement only resulted in mimicry and wasteful adornment. He went so far as to describe ornament as ”immoral” and “degenerate” when he expanded his criticism in the 1908 essay ‘ornament and crime’.
So, Loos sought set out to demonstrate exactly what he thought was an appropriate style, through his architecture.
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| North Facade |
But beyond correcting ornament and facades, Loos had more complex vision of a “plan in three dimensions”. A “Raumplan”, or plan of volumes. As he famously states...
“My architecture is not conceived in plans, but in spaces (cubes). I do not design floor plans, facades, sections. I design spaces. For me, there is no ground floor, first floor etc... For me, there are only contiguous, continual spaces, rooms, anterooms, terraces etc. Stories merge and spaces relate to each other. Every space requires a different height: the dining room is surely higher than the pantry – thus the ceilings are set at different levels. To join these spaces in such a way that the rise and fall are not only unobservable but also practical, in this I see what is for others the great secret, although it is for me a great matter of course...
It is just this spatial interaction and spatial austerity that thus far I have best been able to realize in Dr Müller's house.” (stenograph of a conversation between K. Lhota and A. L., Plzeň, 1930)
Image references:
1. http://www ribajournal.com
Loos quote reference:
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