Adolf Loos

"From 1890 to 1893, Adolf Loos studied architecture at the Technical College in Dresden. As a student, Adolf Loos was particularly interested in the works of the classicist Schinkel and, above all, the works of Vitruvius. Adolf Loos's developing tastes were considerably broadened during a three-year stay in the United States, which began in 1893. The 23-year-old architect was particularly impressed by what he regarded as the innovative efficiency of U.S. industrial buildings, clothing, and household furnishings. In 1896, Adolf Loos returned to Vienna where began working in the building firm of Carl Mayreder."

"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 addressed architecture in his writings, instead, he examined a wide range of social ills; which he identified as the motivating factors behind the struggle for a transformation of everyday life. Adolf Loos 's writings focused increasingly on what he 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. Loos referred to excessive ornamentation as criminal -not for abstract reasons, but because of the economics of labor and wasted materials in modern industrial civilization. Adolf argued that because ornament was no longer an important manifestation of culture, the worker involved in producing it could not be paid a fair price for his labor. "Ornament and Crime" rapidly became a theoretical manifesto and a key document in modernist literature; and it was widely circulated abroad. Le Corbusier later attributed "an Homeric cleansing" of architecture to "Ornament and Crime."

Loos' diatribes against ornament may be found in his ideological underpinning of the social relations of production. His condemnation of ornament is grounded in moral principles; he sees excessive ornamentation as a manifestation of labor exploitation and the conditions that permitted a privileged class, the aristocracy or the high bourgeoisie, to appropriate the fruits of labor of the skilled worker. Loos' critique refers to pre-capitalist forms of production such as the guild and the master artisan as the models of a creative and sophisticated activity that is questionably appropriated by a parasitic element of society. Because of that, Loos' inclination for raw materiality and structure, "the true vocabulary of architecture" (Ibid), is ethically and morally based.

Loos theories imply a total rejection of aestheticism and of the Kantian notion of art and its products as a disinterested activity; "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 (...) Adolf Loos felt that the rest of architecture, which by necessity must serve a specific end, must be excluded from the realm of art" (Ibid).

http://architect.architecture.sk/adolf-loos-architect/adolf-loos-architect.php

For Loos, art is a synonym of waste and parasitism, an attitude that ought to be rejected. Architecture has to be reoriented into a productive activity, an instrument of social and political program. Architecture must serve a social purpose, which is to improve the life of the people and not only to please the aesthetic caprices of the power elites. Function becomes the expression and the tool of social revolutionary change; anything that doesn't serve a concrete task in the overall strategy of social benefit must be discarded as superfluous and even immoral.

Since aesthetics and ethics are closely related, the new notion of beauty is based in utility. If beauty is equated with evil, wrong and unjust; and decoration is all of these; then function and utility express categories of good, right and just. Function becomes equated with beautiful and a conveyor of artistic and aesthetic value in itself. The other elements that take the stage in accompanying function in this radical rejection of ornamentation are space and pattern; with these three elements expression is achieved. One step forward and program and structure becomes the staple of modern architecture.

We can see the ideological underpinning of this way of thinking that expresses the populist roots of functionalist architecture (according to this there is no radical departure in post-modern architecture and aesthetics, i.e. Robert Ventury et all, from modern architecture). Loos was disappointed by and rejected Marxism in 1922. This may explain why his rejection of ornamentation has been not as total as his writings may make us think. 

Looshaus in the Michaelerplatz (1909 -1911). It is hard to believe that construction has to be stopped due to popular outcry after the lack of ornamentation on the facade. A compromise was achieved by adding window boxes.

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Steiner House (1910)

Scheu House (1912)

Scheu House

Note: If your are interested in getting figuratively and imaginatively closer to these and other characters of the Viennese Fin de Siecle, its aesthetics and artistic ideas and the cold way of life of these elements, you may check out "Klimt" the movie, with John Malkovich in the protagonist role; available at Netflix. You may figure out if the character in one of the first scenes of the movie, whose face is graced by Klimt with a cake, is Adolf Loos. Or if he is the character whose wife is a dramatic actor and dancer who Klimt wants to f..k so hard... Her husband sends a substitute in order to get her portrayed by Klimt without an authentic sexual encounter. A nice move so typical of lovely syphilitic Vienna.

* Ruskin admired the verve with which craftsmen built Gothic arches and gargoyles, and condemned the rigid conformity that he found in both classical architecture and the Crystal Palace. Ruskin attacked not just styles, however, but the capitalist core of the industrial Revolution. He saw that the mechanization of society  -even as it made products increasingly available to middle-class consumers-- was creating a  miserable working class. Affected by Ruskin writings, Morris too would take up the cause, founding the Socialist League in 1884 to advocate for the poor. Yet his politics form an integral part of his philosophy as a designer. A return to handcraft, he believed, would give laborers dignity and fulfillment- and make the world a better place." (Ferebee, Ann 34-35).