Adolf Loos

Adolf Loos: "Ornament is a crime" - this is probably the most quoted statement of the prominent architect and one of the most vocal fighters for simplicity and functionality in architecture. Loos's radical rejection of ornament on the one hand and his insistence on the economic aspect of building on the other hand became a direct determinant of the birth of modern architecture and made Adolf Loos one of the most important figures anticipating its advent. Inside the austere forms of Loos's architecture, however, there were, somewhat paradoxically, traditionally furnished rooms with Persian carpets, decorative furniture and luxurious inlaid or stone wall coverings. The interior of the Müller Villa in Prague, which Loos created in 1930 as the most consistent application of his Raumplan - a spatial concept based on the smooth continuity and interconnectedness of the individual parts of a human dwelling, in which the height differences of rooms were defined according to their functions. The question of housing and its culture in the city was more intensively addressed by Loos than by his colleagues. He placed great emphasis on privacy and intimacy, because these were the very qualities that were to help modern man to compensate for the bustle of a vibrant city. Loos travelled throughout Europe, spoke several languages and had a refined lifestyle that made him a respected and sought-after authority for his customers. Adolf Loos was also a very active and important theorist and author of many texts and essays in which he critically rejected all decorativism and everything that hindered the functionality of architecture, applied art and design. In his article Architecture he explains the difference between art and architecture. In his opinion, the latter does not belong among the arts, since a work of art is meant to take people out of their comfort, whereas a house is meant to serve that comfort. The only exception for Loos was the tombstone and the monument. It is important to mention that Loos's father, a stonemason and sculptor working in Brno, specialised mainly in funerary sculpture and sepulchral architecture, which probably influenced the young Loos greatly. The Goldman und Salatsch commercial and residential building, Loos's magnificent realisation in the centre of Vienna, is located in an exposed position on Michaelmas Square, directly opposite the neo-Baroque part of the Imperial Hofburg. Its bold façade, which was free from decoration and classical architectural articles, earned it the nickname "the house without eyebrows". The building received enormous public criticism and was repeatedly described in the press as an insult to Vienna. Today, however, the Loos House, built in 1911, known by the Viennese as the Looshaus, represents a landmark in the development of architecture and is one of the cornerstones of the emerging modernism. Other houses with which Loos made architectural history are those in which he fully developed the concept of Raumplan. In addition to the Müller Villa in Prague, he applied this unique spatial principle to the house of the avant-garde poet Tristan Tzara in Paris and the Moller Villa in Vienna. Adolf Loos considered the essence of architecture to be its interior space, which is evident when looking at the interiors of the houses and villas he designed, the cafés, bars, department stores and their sumptuous portals and shopfronts that have survived in large numbers to this day. Barbora Kovářová