LOOS, Adolf

Austrian architect and applied arts designer. He attended the Staatsgewerbeschule in Reichenberg before he began his studies at the Technical College in Dresden. After this time, he spent three years in Philadelphia (U.S.A.), working various jobs. He returned to Europe in 1896 and settled down in Vienna.

In 1897, the Vienna Secession was founded. Loos established himself as a formidable critic of its fin-de-siècle culture, seen in the burgeoning Sezessionstil and the GesamtkunstwerkGLOSSARYThe German term Gesamtkunstwerk ("total work of art") describes an artwork, design, or creative process where different art forms are combined to create a single cohesive whole. The concept was originally associated with Richard Wagner and his music dramas. Remaining most popular in Germany and Austria, it was developed throughout the 19th and early 20th century by a range of European art movements and became a core tenet of modern art. Although it fell out of favour in the post-modern period, the term is still sometimes used today to describe multimedia artworks and installations. ideal of such architects, as Josef Hoffmann and Joseph Maria Olbrich. In October 1897, Loos's radical polemic began to appear in Die Zeit and turned into a spate of articles in the following year, mainly in the Neue Freie Presse. These covered a wide range of subjects, including, in addition to architecture, furnishings, dress and music, on which Loos adopted a puritanical approach.

The radical defence of his theories and his article "Die Potemkinsche Stadt", published in the journal Ver Sacrum in the summer of 1898 in a very polemic manner, led to the final break with the leading architects of the Wiener Secession: Josef Hoffmann and Josef Maria Olbrich. At the same time, Loos developed an affinity for the underplayed styles emerging from the English Arts and Crafts movementGLOSSARYThe Arts and Crafts movement was an international trend in the decorative and fine arts that began in Britain and flourished in Europe and North America between about 1880 and 1920, emerging in Japan in the 1920s as the Mingei movement. It stood for traditional craftsmanship using simple forms, and often used medieval, romantic, or folk styles of decoration. It had a strong influence on the arts in Europe until it was displaced by Modernism in the 1930s, and its influence continued among craft makers, designers, and town planners long afterwards. The movement was inspired by the ideas of architect Augustus Pugin, writer John Ruskin, and designer William Morris. It developed earliest and most fully in the British Isles and spread across the British Empire and to the rest of Europe and America., admiring the simplification of form and unadorned surfaces of the English domestic revival of the 1890s.

In 1920, he was appointed chief architect to the housing department of the city of Vienna, which was suffering from a chronic shortage of housing. He produced numerous housing projects in which he tried to break away from the conventional courtyard plan. In 1922, he moved to Paris, where he exerted a significant influence upon modern French architecture, in particular Le Corbusier (1887-1965. He gave lectures at the Sorbonne and constructed a house and atelier for the dadaist Tristan Tzara.

In 1928 Loos returned to Vienna, and in a series of houses built in Vienna and Prague towards the end of his career, he fully developed the Raumplan concept.

Major architectural works by Adolf Loos are the Café Museum, Vienna (1899); Villa Karma, Montreux (1904); American Bar, Vienna (1908); Looshaus, Vienna (1910); Steiner House, Vienna (1910); Rufer House, Vienna (1922); Tristan Tzara House, Paris (1925); residential interiors, Plzen.

Of some 30 articles written by Loos during 1904-14, undoubtedly the most influential was 'Ornament und Verbrechen' and 'Architektur'. The former, which equates human cultural development with the progressive shedding of ornament, is widely dated to 1908 and used to exemplify Loos's early influence in determining the character of Modernist architecture. In the latter, he advocated simplicity.