Loos canon

Wish Magazine, The Australian

2 August 2013

A Viennese pilgrimage reveals the paradoxes and passions of Adolf Loos.

One of the most influential architects of the modernist tradition came from the Viennese fin de siecle that fathered Gustav Klimt, Arnold Schoenberg, Gustav Mahler and Sigmund Freud.

Adolf Loos, author of the 1908 lamentation Ornament and Crime, made a lasting impression on le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe and left behind a body of attractive commercial and domestic work blending simplicity and great material warmth. His legacy also includes a trove of projects, notions and opinions reflecting a genuinely idiosyncratic cast of mind.

There are also furniture pieces such as the light and sinuous cafe chair in carved beech that still bears his name, manufactured initially for the Cafe Museum, modelled in Vienna's 1st district to a restrained Loos design. To our eyes - and to Loos himself - this bentwood chair is an emblem of utility and elegance. But in his time the cafe it was designed for earned the sobriquet "Cafe Nihilism". In an age and a place that favoured the sumptuous, Loos championed the spare.

Loos's buildings can still be seen in the Czech Republic, Switzerland and Paris, but their greatest concentration remains in and around Vienna. His most famous work, the so-called Looshaus from 1911, rears its rectilinear facade boldly on the old Hapsburg capital's neo-baroque Michaelplatz. As the building was nearing completion, the architect confronted such howls of outrage from the Viennese public that he was forced to embellish the unadorned windows of its upper levels with window boxes. But it was all too much for emperor Franz Joseph, residing in the palace opposite; he is said to have drawn his plush regal curtains against the abomination.

The Moravian-born Loos, who was aged 30 at the turn of the century, is not a perfect fit with the modernist school that broke all the old aesthetic rules, for both good and bad, in the decade to 1910. He is a herald of, and a precursor to, modernism without being a card-carrying modernist. Loos is at once an aesthetic progressive and a conservative; a revolutionary gazing at the horizon and a nostalgiste peering at the past. He is crazy for the new American skyscraper and almost anything woody, tweedy and British. He worries endlessly about the distinction between fashion and style, flux and permanence; and he writes charming essays on men's fashion, plumbing, hats, fine china, thriftiness and adding salt to one's meals. The son of a stonemason, Loos builds in concrete and glass while retaining an abiding affection for marble, wood, brickwork, tapestries - for craft. He remains, ultimately, an enigma.

In his zesty polemical essays, Loos rails against the figure of the dandy, while dressing only in the finest suits. For his work designing the jewel-like Viennese menswear store Knize, he is even paid in apparel. Perhaps his greatest sensitivity, as an architect, is to the lived quality of interior space: he develops novel and far-reaching ideas about the spatial interaction of rooms and corridors in which "storeys merge and spaces relate to each other". This Raumplan, or "ground plan", stresses the interplay or flow of interior cells with different functions, moods and ceiling heights; to experience these designs as actual three-dimensional volumes is to be led through a building, charmed and enticed.

But the architect who developed this exquisite conception of the interior went on to denounce the influence of architecture on interior design. "I am against the trend [represented in his eyes by the Secession architect Otto Wagner] which sees a positive advantage in having everything in a building, right down to the coal shovel, come from the hand of one architect," he trumpeted. Loos may not have designed a coal shovel - though one can never be entirely sure. He did, however, design lamps, stools and drinking sets. He is, in other words, perilously close to being the kind of architect he so publicly derides.

The apparent paradoxes pile up when, time and again, he insists on design "in the style of the times" and breezily declares: "When I pass review over the past thousands of years and ask myself in which age I would like to have lived, I would most certainly say, here and now." But he proceeds, in an age of the most flamboyantly gifted painters - Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka and others - to decorate the apartment of a middle-class Viennese client with inlaid monochrome photographs of long-dead old masters such as Goya and Delacroix. The effect is strikingly - absurdly - anachronistic. Loos saw himself as a "man with modern nerves". But this mock-heroic affectation conceals a deep and sentimental feeling for the past.

While in his essays Loos equates ornament with "savagery", his Looshaus is clad in green Cipollino marble - a little like pistachio-swirl ice cream - and boasts a row of Doric columns that serve no load-bearing function; they are entirely ornamental. These contradictions make it impossible to take an accurate measure of Loos's mind, and they complicate discussions of his legacy. Like the poet Walt Whitman before him, he is large and contains multitudes. But the boldness and vibrancy with which Loos expresses himself make for an engaging presence. This is as true of his writings as his designs - those fully realised and those, such as the Josephine Baker house in Paris with its liquorice allsorts facade, that remain unbuilt. Despite his reputation for aesthetic austerity, Loos strove at all times for impact, and he made it in fine style.

Vienna is the main urban centre for Loos pilgrims, and on a recent visit I spent a few days padding from one site to another. The city makes the Loos lover feel at home. Architectural visits to the bijou Loos-designed menswear store Knize - from the narrow entrance the store unfolds in a series of small and finely crafted spatial curiosities in warm wood - are tolerated in the hope, one suspects, that the charm of the interior will induce a plunge for the wallet. Although the second storey of the Looshaus on Michaelplatz, originally a tailor's headquarters and now a bank, is off-limits, sadly, the ground floor with its sweeping Deco-like staircase has been lovingly preserved. The Wien Museum is the beneficiary of Loos's cosy apartment, reconstructed from original fittings, while a more upscale apartment designed by the architect and only recently confirmed as one of his works can be viewed, by appointment, at a bridge club.

My favourite space is the minuscule Loos American bar on Karntner Strasse. Loos had visited Chicago in 1893 and even attended the World's Columbian Exposition of that year. And yet other than the name, there is nothing particularly American about this masterpiece. In fact, the dimensions of the saloon - at 27 square metres - are more Tokyo than Chicago. So much for the prescription against ornamentation! Loos's marble ceiling, refracted in a set of mirrored planes above eye level, is coffered like the temples of antiquity. Its square insets - Loos loved squares - mirror the green and white marble chequerboard floor. All this conspires to create the illusion of space and the rhythm of pattern. The American bar is sleek and luxurious, cosy and hard-edged. It dreams of the future and dreams of the past, looking confidently in each direction. And come midnight it is very, very crowded.

Loos provoked passions in his time and stirs curiosity in ours. At a recent symposium on his work in Vienna, Loos experts speculated about whether or not he would have warmed to Adidas sneakers. For reasons that have as much to do with questions about architecture's direction in the first decades of the 21st century as the answers he sought in the first decades of the 20th, he is enjoying a late flowering. Three years ago, Loos's essays were republished in English under collections with catchy titles - Why a man should be well-dressed, and Creating your home with style- that would sit beautifully in a glossy magazine. And in October an exhibition entitled Adolf Loos: Our Contemporary makes its journey from Vienna to New York.

I caught up with the Loos exhibition, developed by Columbia University Loos expert Yehuda E. Safran, in its last week at Vienna's Museum for Applied Arts. The exhibition space was dimly lit, as many of the works on display are original drawings, sketches and photographs - including a well-known Man Ray portrait of the thin-lipped and panda-eyed Loos. Also on show is the architect's provocative entry for a competition to design the new Chicago Tribune newspaper office: a 21-storey tower in the form of a blank monumental black granite classical column in the Doric order. The museum's co-curator, Rainald Franz, believes that the design was never meant to be taken seriously: "It was a joke," he tells me. "Loos thinks of a newspaper column; so he designs a newspaper column."

Franz describes the show as an attempt to trace the rich lines of Loos's influence and to gauge his impact on architects as various as Irish designer Eileen Grey, Austrian-American Richard Neutra, Italian Aldo Rossi, Dutchman Rem Koolhaas and Portugal's Pritzker-prize winner, Eduardo Souto de Moura. In a series of interviews screening at the exhibition, architects talk about Loos, their relationship to his "ground plan" and, in Franz's words, "what this means for their attitudes and ideas about what architecture should be nowadays". Franz refers to this dialogue as core museum business. Through words and images a legacy is brought to life.

The title of the exhibition is catchy, and there are several catalogue essays published in support of the proposition: Loos is us. Franz, though, homes in on the obvious point that Loos, as an individualist, would probably not have approved of much that was built in the name of international modernism. "He would certainly be opposed to the cheap commercialism of modern architecture," he suggests. This is not to say Loos was uninterested in cheap housing. As Vienna's chief architect in the early 1920s, he pressed his out-there imagination into the service of low-cost housing solutions and patented a "house with one wall" which, in principle at least, allowed supporting walls to be hung at low cost off the one supporting spine of an integrated group.

But here again Loos was at some remove from a party - in this case, Vienna's red housing movement - that could have claimed him. Far too restless for dogma, he moderated his social concerns with a deep affinity with avant-garde artists such as Arnold Schoenberg of the second Viennese school. Though a pungent critic of the Viennese Secession, which objected to the prevailing conservatism of the time, he was never to openly criticise its figurehead, Gustav Klimt, and seemed to believe that Otto Wagner's individual brilliance outshone, or excused, his membership of that most odious of professions. Architects, Loos writes with his tongue only partially in his cheek, "should be poisoned". He was never to complete his architectural qualifications and seems to have felt acutely the lack of social glue binding him to the strictly organised world of prewar Vienna. For all his urbane sophistication there is something wild and unschooled - certainly unsystematic - about him.

"It is clear," remarks Franz, "that he was not a man of clear ideas, and that some of the ideas he espoused he later changed. Over a decade after the publication of Ornament and Crime he writes that he is only opposed to new ornament. In any event, if you walk into the Looshaus you will find ornament."

You will indeed. What the building's first critics could not see, perhaps because their eyes had been educated by Biedermeier upholsteries and empire furnishings, was the way the Looshaus interior pairs bold a masculine old-world warmth with the materials of the new world order: glass and concrete. The title of the exhibition, soon to be in New York, obscures an important point about Loos's legacy. Modern architecture, as it evolved through the middle decades of the 20th century, might have been better - more individualistic, humanistic and warmer in tone - if it had been more deeply attuned to the quirky legacy of Adolf Loos than the rigidities of Bauhaus-inspired internationalism. If Adolf Loos is our contemporary, it is not before time.

As to the question of sneakers, he would I'm sure have sniffed at the big multinational brands, preferring something hand-made, produced in low-volumes. But never, ever - he was emphatic about this - with elastic sides. He was that kind of guy.*