Page 31 - Studio International - July August 1973

Siedlungen of the post-abdication, the newly naiveté, a concentration on the passage from one Anglo-Saxon lands, in his paradise. He never
Republican Vienna. It was the nearest he came material to another, the lack of a sense of urban attempted a systematic view, a coherent theory
to giving positive expression to the western context for them, the absence for want of a of architecture, or of anything else for that
civilization he spoke of in architecture. But he better word, of a sense of structure. After all, the matter. He was obsessed with immediate
was consumed by one or two detailed ideas pleasures of his architecture are the pleasures of sensations as ingredients of a perfect way of life.
which he never fully worked out: the terrace touch. And yet he was dimly aware of a The quality of smell and of touch, the
house with weight-bearing party-walls, and mystery beyond, a mystery which he could not juxtaposition of textures, the passage of an
light construction cross-wall (what he called quite name. 'All art is erotic', he had written in inhabitant from one volume to another, all
`the house with one wall'); the use of stepped Ornament and Crime. The erotic element in art these he observed with a sharp and loving eye.
terraces, so that the roof of one house could had to be sublimated, however. The man who Beyond this, and more gropingly, he sought
serve as garden to the next; the provision of scrawls explicit erotic signs on walls is, again, a for an architecture which could communicate
access at every other floor, so that the terrace criminal or a degenerate, like all tattooers of and reconcile man to his fate. Though again it
became in fact an immeuble villa, to adapt surface. And yet, ornament cannot be dismissed was not man in general with whom he concerned
Corbusier's phrase. But his appointment did not altogether, for in the end the business of himself, but the same inhabitant of his
and could not last. Only one of his Siedlungen architecture is evocative. In attempting to get buildings whose senses he wanted to stimulate
was actually built, only partly following his plans closer to this idea, he fell into a strange figure. and soothe. And beyond him, the passer-by:
before he retired, disappointed and embittered, `When, in a wood we come on a mound, six foot every building of his is not a maze which traps
to Paris. It is too easy to say that it was fated, long, three foot wide, heaped up into a pyramid a way of life, but a presence which communicates
that he should have remained the architect of with a spade, then we become serious and with its inanimate neighbours.
the individual villa. Although all his projects for something says inside us : someone lies buried It is these two passions which make him so
great public buildings show him at his worst, here. That is architecture'. fascinating a figure: since he tried to capture
the low income housing absorbed his ingenious Obsessionally almost (and in his later years and celebrate things which his contemporaries
talent, drew the egalitarian and the moralist in ever more despairingly), Loos followed the ideal had taken for granted, and were discarding in
him to a full engagement. of an architecture which could communicate; the name of progress. And which — now that
However, although the failure was primarily communicate about this perfect way of life they are lost — we miss in a way our fathers, his
political, there is in the projects a kind of which seemed to him realized in the contemporaries, would never have imagined. q

View of the model for the Josephine Baker House,
Paris

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