Adolf Loos

Adolf Loos wrote that ornament was a crime and built a house on the Michaelerplatz so plain that Vienna called it the house without eyebrows. He was a stonemason's son from Brno who spent three years in the United States in his twenties - working odd jobs, seeing Chicago and the Louis Sullivan generation - and came back with a conviction that the decorated surfaces of the Secession were a form of dishonesty. Ornament and Crime, the 1908 lecture, argues that decoration is labour wasted and a survival from a primitive state, an argument that is partly cultural-evolutionary nonsense and partly the founding text of architectural modernism, and both halves have to be said. His buildings are not bare inside: the Raumplan arranged rooms at different levels according to their use rather than on flat floors, and the interiors are lined in marble and rich wood. The Looshaus of 1910 opposite the Hofburg outraged the emperor, who is said to have kept his curtains shut. He was convicted in 1928 of indecency with underage girls he had used as models, which is a fact about him and not a footnote. The American Bar in Vienna, about four metres by six, is lined in mahogany and onyx and remains one of the most studied small interiors of the century. The Villa Muller in Prague is the fullest surviving Raumplan house. He designed a skyscraper in the form of a giant Doric column for the Chicago Tribune competition of 1922, which reads as either a joke or a refutation of his own doctrine. He was deaf for much of his later life. He built houses for Tristan Tzara and, on paper, for Josephine Baker. His conviction in 1928 carried a partly suspended sentence and he remained at work afterwards.

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