In 1897, in the pages of The Neue Freie Presse of Vienna, Adolf Loos initiated a series of polemic articles that later established his international reputation. Adolf Loos did not directly address architecture in his writings. Instead, Adolf Loos examined a wide range of social ills, which Adolf Loos identified as the motivating factors behind the struggle for a transformation of everyday life. Adolf Loos 's writings focused increasingly on what Adolf Loos regarded as the excess of decoration in both traditional Viennese design and in the more recent products of the Vienna Secession and the Wiener Werkstatte. In 1898, in the pages of the review Ver Sacrum, which was an organ of the Wiener Secession, Adolf Loos published an essay that marked the beginning of a long theoretical opposition to the then popular art noveau movement. His theories culminated in a short essay entitled, "Ornament And Crime," published in 1908. 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 essay rapidly became a theoretical manifesto and a key document in modernist literature and was widely circulated abroad. Le Corbusier later attributed "an Homeric cleansing" of architecture to the work.
Another 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. The only exception, that is, the only constructions that belong both to art and architecture, were the monument and the tombstone. Adolf Loos felt that the rest of architecture, which by necessity must serve a specific end, must be excluded from the realm of art.
related links
Adolf Loos - Great Buildings Online
Vitruvio.ch - Adolf Loos ( Czech Republic - Repubblica Ceca)
In 1899, Adolf Loos designed the Cafe Museum, which proved to be one of the most notable projects of his early work. The austere interior was a mature architectural embodiment of his theorized renunciation of stylish ornamentation. The starkness of the "untattooed" facade that inspired the popular name Cafe Nihilismus asserted Adolf Loos 's developing theory of the predominance of technique over decoration. The cafe also affirms his aesthetic equation of beauty and utility by bringing every object back to its purely utilitarian value. To Adolf Loos, that which is beautiful must also be useful. Thus, the only elements Adolf Loos used to pattern the vaulted ceiling of the cafe interior were strips of brass, which also served as electrical conductors. A more refined work, the tiny Karntner Bar Vienna (1907), reveals in microcosm the architect's great sensitivity to spatial manipulation. Once again, Adolf Loos showed his fondness for the expressive use of natural materials as Adolf Loos skillfully manipulated classical materials including marble, onyx, wood, and mirror, into a careful composition of visual patterns.
Between 1909 and 1911, Adolf Loos designed and constructed one of his best known works, the controversial Looshaus in the Michaelerplatz, in the heart of old Vienna. This complex design enunciated theorems on the relationship between the memory of the historic past of a great city and the invention of the new city based on the modern work of architecture. The design was characterized by a mute facade from which all ornamental plastic shapes were absent. For Adolf Loos, the language of the environment of the metropolis was centered in the absence of all ornament. In 1910, a public furor spawned by the simplicity of the modernistic design resulted in a municipal order to suspend work; construction ceased and building permits were denied. Adolf Loos responded to the attacks in a public meeting attended by more than 2000 angry residents. The controversy ended with an agreement to add window boxes in an