Page 27 - Studio International - July August 1973

Adolf Loos: already so remote as to need comment. woman can prepare the most exquisite meal in
One key to it is his insistently patrician and
a quarter of an hour; she twitters like a bird and
the new vision even supercilious view of his contemporaries. always smiles ...' could not be the product of
His was not the superciliousness of the
much direct experience; in spite of the visits to
aristocrat, however: Loos was a professing Philadelphia cousins, his stay in America seems
Joseph Rykwert democrat, even something of an egalitarian, in to have been taken up with nights washing-up in
spite of his weakness for the ceremonial display restaurants, living in the YMCA and poor
of the Viennese court. lodgings, some journalism and occasional
His family was unremarkable, though his recourse to the breadline. But those three years
background was a strong influence. He was the in the United States did form Loos's view of
son of a prosperous craftsman: a monumental what he was about decisively. He was to be an
mason who had been very conscious of the architect, and in that sense a builder like his
dignity of his trade. He had practised this trade father. But he was also to bring to Vienna the
of his and lived in Brno, on the border of the inestimable gift of Western culture; his little
Czech and German-speaking Habsburg lands. magazine (of which only two numbers
Adolf Loos was born there in 1870; he was appeared) Das Andere (The Other) had as its
therefore 48 when the Habsburg Empire fell. subtitle 'a paper for the introduction of Western
He died in 1933, the year of the Nazi rise to culture to Austria'. This Western culture had a
power, a deaf, broken man in spite of his curious physiognomy. Its structure could not be
relatively young age. His writings were marked described; it was made up of surface details,
by the feeling their titles summed up : Ins Leere which together gave the outline of a fabled and
Gesprochen and Trotzdem (Spoken into the Void, highly desirable state of affairs. Look at the
and Nonetheless). The sense of contradiction is matters with which Das Andere dealt : clothes,
inherent from the outset. Loos had been — manners, table manners in particular; begging;
surely more than his father even — aware of the sexual mores among the very young; the
nobility and worth of the paternal calling. But overdecoration of Wagner's Tristan in the
his father had died when Loos was just over ten Vienna Opera; the ill manners of the very great
years old, and his veneration for his father's (the Emperor Wilhelm II is named); street
memory contrasted sharply with his distaste for decorations for state visits and so on.
his mother's ways, her drudging insistence on All the time, the manners of the Anglo-Saxon
security and achievement. The army, the countries are assumed as a model, as a standard
art-school and finally the American journey of reference. The right way to do things is the
liberated him, severed the family ties and way they are done at the heart of civilization,
formulated his resolve to become an architect. and that was either in London or in New York.
Already, when he was a student at the Dresden By comparison with their ways, Austrian
Gewerbeschule, he showed his mettle. Unlike manners are found wanting at every point.
most of his contemporaries, he rejected the Much attention is paid, for instance, to the lack
servitude of the fraternities and the brand of a of spoons for the salt-cellars of Viennese
duelling scar that went with it. It was not only restaurants. And, sometimes, this insistence is
his distaste for the philistine ways of most of his taken to extreme lengths: Loos rediscovers the
student contemporaries, but also a fastidious aubergine, familiar in Europe since the
care for personal propriety and integrity which sixteenth century, as the American egg-plant;
motivated him. And his civil courage was and arranges to have American-type aubergine
already firm. fritters served daily for a week in a named
The fastidiousness was already in evidence vegetarian restaurant in the hope of inspiring
Adolf Loos was not the finest architect of the when he first went to do his military service in Viennese housewives and restaurateurs into
century. But amongst twentieth-century Vienna. Leather and silver objects of high emulation.
architects, he was probably the only one (with quality became his passion. The designers of It may all seem very remote from Loos's
the possible exception of Le Corbusier) to be a that time regarded surface as a free field for central business of architecture. And yet for him
major writer. the ornamental inventor. Curves, lines, inlays of it was not. Whenever he worked, he was always
His prose was not of a kind we associate with varied materials covered all available plane almost obsessively interested in how a building
architects nowadays; they write as if they were surfaces. Instinctively, Loos already sought the would be occupied. His great hostility to the
`important' people. Their style is usually smooth, the barely chamfered or edged. A Seccession, the group of anti-academic Viennese
hermetic and shrouds the questionable passion for smooth and precious surfaces was an artists who were the Austrian branch of Art
mysteries of their trade. They like to appear as instinctive preference — which, as I will try to Nouveau, turned on this point also. Art Nouveau
demiurge master-builders; creators of the whole show, he later rationalized. His period at architects and designers thought that a new
artificial world. Their work must rival the arts-and-crafts schools had left him with an style could be created for their own time in
gigantic and discontinuous scale of the hangars interest in ornament — as he recognizes in one or terms of an ornamental vocabulary, which would
at Cape Kennedy or the thrills of the Las Vegas two autobiographical pieces; but when he have no relation to historical ornament, but
nightlife panorama if it is to make the impact returned to Austria, his taste had been cleared would be drawn entirely and directly from
which they seek. by the sharp, clear Anglo-Saxon air he had nature. Some went even further. They thought
Loos would have regarded such ambitions as breathed. And he rejoiced that the sensible that this ornamental surface could be applied
incomprehensible. He was, it is true, a man Viennese bourgeoisie had rejected the fancy not only to walls, windows, floors, and pieces of
self-confessedly modern, a man who worked ornament which had become so popular in furniture, but also to clothes and even to
towards a better and more vital society; or more Germany and France. He was, of course, a jewellery in a scientific fashion, so as to
precisely against a claustrophobic and faded one. mythomane. His idea that 'the American stimulate or reflect emotional states.
But his own understanding of his modernity is kitchen never smells of onion, that the American In some ways, this attitude to ornament had

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