Adolf Loos
Adolf Loos
Adolf Franz Karl Viktor Maria Looswas an Austrian and Czechoslovak architect and influential European theorist of Modern architecture. His essay Ornament and Crime advocated smooth and clear surfaces in contrast to the lavish decorations of the Fin de siècle and also to the more modern aesthetic principles of the Vienna Secession. Loos became a pioneer of modern architecture and contributed a body of theory and criticism of Modernism in architecture and design...
NationalityAustrian
ProfessionArchitect
Date of Birth10 December 1870
CountryAustria
The work of art is brought into the world without there being a need for it. The house satisfies a requirement. The work of art is responsible to none; the house is responsible to everyone. The work of art wants to draw people out of their state of comfort.
Man loves everything that satisfies his comfort. He hates everything that wants to draw him out of his acquired and secured position and that disturbs him. Thus he loves the house and hates art.
The work of art shows people new directions and thinks of the future. The house thinks of the present.
All art is erotic. The first ornament to have been invented, the cross, was of erotic origin. It was the first work of art. A horizontal stroke: the woman lying down. A vertical stroke: the male who penetrates her.
If nothing were left of an extinct race but a single button, I would be able to infer, form the shape of that button, how these people dressed, built their houses, how they lived, what was their religion, their art, their mentality.
The house has to serve comfort. The work of art is revolutionary; the house is conservative.
The house has to please everyone, contrary to the work of art which does not. The work is a private matter for the artist. The house is not.
The architect can only achieve this if he establishes a relationship with those buildings which have hitherto created this sentiment in man.
It does not do to use it with forms whose origin is intimately bound up with a specific material simply because no technical difficulties stand in the way.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century we abandoned tradition, it's at that point that I intend to renew it because the present is built on the past just as the past was built on the times that went before it.
Does it follow that the house has nothing in common with art and is architecture not to be included in the arts? Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else that fulfils a function is to be excluded from the domain of art.
The room has to be comfortable; the house has to look habitable.
The law courts must appear as a threatening gesture toward secret vice. The bank must declare: here your money is secure and well looked after by honest people.
The Potemkin city of which I wish to speak here is none other than our dear Vienna herself.