Looshaus

Opposite the emperor’s palace Adolf Loos built a commercial building with smooth, unornamented façades above a ground floor of green marble. The Viennese compared it to a house without eyebrows, and the emperor is said to have avoided the windows facing the square.

In 1909 the tailoring firm Goldman & Salatsch commissioned a new commercial and residential building on the Michaelerplatz, opposite the Hofburg. Adolf Loos designed the building, which was finished in 1911. Loos had written the essay Ornament and Crime, in which he argued that ornament was waste and a sign of a lack of culture. When the façade was finished without decoration there was a scandal, and the city authorities halted construction for a time. The compromise was window boxes beneath the windows.

The ground floor and mezzanine have a façade of cipollino marble from Euboea, with massive Tuscan columns at the entrance. That is where the shop and workshops were. The upper floors, with flats, have smooth rendered façades and plain windows without surrounds. Inside, the materials were luxurious: precious woods, brass and mirrors. Loos worked with the volume of the room in three dimensions, which he later called the Raumplan, in which rooms of different heights are combined on different levels.

The building is now owned by a bank and has been restored. It is regarded as one of the first examples of modernism’s unornamented façade and a decisive moment in the debate about decoration. Loos’s ideas influenced Le Corbusier and other modernists. The building also shows that Loos was not against fine materials; he simply believed they should speak for themselves.

• Functionalism
• Adolf Loos