Adolf Loos's infamous denunciation of ornament helped change the course of modern architecture not because it was the first time that an architect recognized the widening gulf between decoration and structure, but because it was the first time that an architect theorized a detrimental relationship between decoration and cultural evolution. In a series of demonstrative buildings, built mostly in the Austro-Hungarian lands between the late 1890s and 1914, Loos argued that the direction of modern culture points away from the adornment of buildings. On the rear facade of the Steiner House (Vienna, 1910), Loos produced a masterpiece of austerity, a white stucco box of symmetrical windows absent of any symbolic references to the traditions of monumental architecture. For the street frontage of the Scheu House (1912), this time asymmetrically massed through staggered roof terraces, Loos similarly composed a house of severe geometric lines, plain white surfaces, and unframed windows; and, in the seminal essay "Ornament and Crime" (1908), he wrote that "the man of our own times who covers the walls with erotic images from an inner compulsion is a criminal or a degenerate... cultural evolution is equivalent to the removal of ornament from articles of daily use."

In the 19th century, art historians had conceived of the arts within a grand narrative that was inherently either progressive or regressive. Examples of the latter were almost exclusively the province of non-European peoples, whose arts were judged to lie on a spectrum ranging from the savage and barbaric (for example, most hunter-gatherer societies) to the static (such as Egypt or China). Loos, in his essays, contrasted the most "barbaric" of artistic cultures—the baroque tools and bodies of recently studied Pacific Island cultures (the "Papuans," as he called them)—with civilized contemporary Europe. Among the latter, he stated, ornament had become an outdated fetish and wasteful social expenditure, in conflict with modern notions of propriety, efficiency, and productive labor management.

Loos found his contemporary paradise largely in England and the United States. He remarked on numerous occasions that architecture's true course of evolution led toward English values of restraint and asceticism. Between 1893 and 1896, he traveled throughout the eastern United States and experienced firsthand raw productive building forces unfettered by nostalgia for the past, the possibility of creating an architecture of the moment. On his return to Vienna, he undertook a series of articles for the influential Neue Freie Presse that sought to inculcate foreign ideas as models for Viennese design. These efforts eventually resulted in the creation of a short-lived, self-published journal, Das Andere (The Other), devoted to the introduction of Anglo-Saxon culture into Austria.

Loos criticized the backward educational methods of the major Viennese art and design schools. The truth of modern architecture could never emerge by means of historicist copying of decorated details; this resulted in the counterfeit architecture of Ringstrasse Vienna where entire neighborhoods appointed the elaborate sculptures and florid moldings previously reserved for the palaces of the aristocracy. Indeed, advances in industrial production had led to the widespread practice of tacking inexpensive and machine-made ornamented facades onto relatively simple buildings. Austrian cities, Loos claimed, were becoming like the Potemkin villages that Catherine the Great passed through in the poor Russian provinces, false fronts erected to cover the poverty underneath. Insofar as ornamented buildings pretended to be something that they were not, Loos regarded them as examples of the overall corruption of language, thought, and architecture in contemporary times.

If Loos condemned historicism, he also condemned the attempts of the newer generation of Viennese artists and architects to come up with a contemporary artistic and ornamental language. Although he was well acquainted with members of the Vienna Secession and the German and Austrian variants of the Art Nouveau (that is, Jugendstil and Moderne), he felt that their attempts to unify art and industry were fruitless and nostalgic. After 1900, architects such as Josef Maria Olbrich, Josef Hoffmann, and Hermann Muthesius increasingly became his adversaries. As Loos wrote in the essay "Cultural Degeneration" (1908), it was unnecessary to fabricate a contemporary style from the collective work of artists and industrialists in the manner of the German Werkbund.

Most important, one did not find the style of the times in the works of artists. As Loos described in his essay "Architecture" (1910), art and architecture have completely different aims. Art is individualistic and revolutionary; architecture is collective and conservative, based on values of purpose and comfort. Few of Loos's ideas were more controversial than this assertion that art should be excluded from everyday architectural design, in fact, from all design, with the exception of monuments and funerary shrines.

In designs for chairs and tables and for the interior of the Cafe Museum (Vienna, 1899), Loos delineated an architectural syntax of restraint and propriety. In an evolutionary sense, he sought to continue what he saw as the last sane epoch of design, the Biedermeier era of the mid-19th century, a time when middle-class design embodied values of practicality, simplicity, and clarity. This approach did not, however, exclude all historicist elements, as indicated by the Doric porticoes on the Villa Karma (Clarens, Switzerland, 1904) or the Michaelerplatz Building (Vienna, 1910). Rather, it emphasized the creation of an architecture that could fit in with both its times and its surroundings. Although the spare surfaces of the Michaelerplatz Building stand apart from its ornate historicist neighbors, its tripartite composition draws from traditional Viennese design; Loos was greatly bothered by criticism that the building was not contextual.

In Loos's buildings, beyond the jolt of seeing architecture absent of artistic screens and filters, visual interest emerges from the qualities of surfaces and the progression of interior spaces. Rooms in the Kartner Bar (Vienna, 1907-1908), the Michaelerplatz Building, and the Knize Store (Vienna, 1913) are covered with sumptuous materials: contrasts of dark mahogany with brass and mirrors, walls of flowing marble, and deep tones of oak and cherry wood paneling. Loos's lavish revetments are the result of his idea that each material possesses its own language of form. If one material covers another, it should strive to the fullest extent to avoid any hint of replication. Loos's Raumplan (spatial plan) is present in many of his houses and even some public buildings. It embodies the idea of a series of interlocking spaces connected via staircases across the levels of a building and dismisses the separation by sectional floors (or planes) characteristic of most architecture.

In his oeuvre, Loos relied heavily on the effect of shock. As one of the earliest avant-garde architects, opposed to the traditional architectural establishment as well as so-called progressive architectural movements, he was polemical and intentionally enigmatic. Throughout his life, Loos was deeply concerned with realizing the elusive qualities of the contemporary moment and thus bringing architecture closer to the design process that results in a well-cut suit. As his diverse legacy points out, however, the logic of contemporary times that Loos so avidly sought out often yielded an architectural portrait of the modern age distinguished by controversy and double entendre.

MITCHELL SCHWARZER

Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.2 (G-O).  Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005.