Adolf Loos
Adolf Loos wrote that ornament is crime and built the Looshaus in Vienna with smooth façades opposite the emperor’s palace. Inside he worked with luxurious materials and rooms on different levels, his Raumplan.
Adolf Loos was born in 1870 in Brünn in Moravia, today Brno in the Czech Republic, the son of a stonemason. He studied at the technical college in Dresden but did not take a degree. In 1893–1896 he lived in the United States, where he took various jobs and was impressed by American everyday life and the architecture of Chicago. He then settled in Vienna, where he wrote critical articles on architecture, fashion and daily life. He was a close friend of the writer Karl Kraus and the composer Arnold Schoenberg.
In the essay Ornament and Crime, which he gave as a lecture in 1910, Loos argued that ornament was waste and that a modern culture should do without it. His first works were shops and cafés, such as the Café Museum and the small American Bar in Vienna. The Looshaus on the Michaelerplatz, 1909–1911, caused a scandal with its smooth façades. In villas such as the Haus Steiner in Vienna and the Villa Müller in Prague he developed the Raumplan, in which rooms of different heights are fitted together in a three-dimensional puzzle. He worked in Paris in the 1920s and designed a house for the poet Tristan Tzara.
Loos died in 1933 near Vienna. His ideas about the abolition of ornament became important for modernism, and Le Corbusier published his essays in his magazine. Yet he was no functionalist in the strict sense: he loved marble, precious woods and brass and wanted materials to speak for themselves. His life has also been examined critically in recent times. His Raumplan has inspired architects who work with rooms on several levels.