In the domicile
Picking up Loos
By Lucia Billing
“Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb [Grabmal] and the monument [Denkmal]. Everything else that fulfils a function is to be excluded from the domain of art”
— Adolf Loos, 1910
Reviewed(ish)
Ornament and Crime, Adolf Loos
Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays, Adolf Loos
Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, Beatriz Colomina
Sexuality & Space, Beatriz Colomina
Louis Philippe, or, The Interior, Walter Benjamin
Prosthetic Gods, Hal Foster
Much of this article is owed to Beatriz Colomina’s work on Adolf Loos. For someone of his importance, both of building and of text, secondary texts about the designer are deeply lacking. Colomina (great curator, etc.) is probably essential to anyone looking at Loos past the Second World War. Hopefully this article can give some tribute to the writer, convincing those interested to have a look at her texts.
The quick abstract which Wikipedia gives to introduce the figure of Adolf Loos states the following:
Adolf Franz Karl Viktor Maria Loos was an Austrian and Czechoslovak architect, influential European theorist, polemicist of modern architecture, and convicted sex offender.
— Wikipedia Writers
Quite a strange characterisation! Despite the fact that all clauses ring true, it is a great example of the committed anxiety and slight weariness which emerges when discussing Loos. He tends to be placed in a bit of a lesser regard than his stylistic, and spatiotemporal contemporaries. Coming from Austria, he started out as a disciple of the Arts and Crafts, and then later moving vehemently against it. The 1910 lecture (later published in 1913) Ornament and Crime has become a key text for modern design, as well as modernist ideology. Loos was both architect and designer, though he came into the belief that the two should be firmly separate, drawing a deep gulf between him and the popular gesamtkunsverk impulse of the time. His short story Poor Little Rich Man (1900) starts with this titular rich man commissioning an artist to build, and decorate a house for him. When it is revealed, it is of course a total work of art, with design imbued into every corner of it. The man is delighted, and as he moves in, decides to hang up a few paintings that he has collected. Immediately, the designer tells him that he should stop, the house has no space for art, as it is that in itself.
Other parts of his design bases include his delight in the unphotographable nature of his work — due to a lengthening of the process of facade-plan detachment, as well as his use of parallaxes. Loos also confirmed the role of the architect to first and foremost make a large sort of blanket fort, and then to provide the structure for said fort. This has led his work to be described as an architecture of the womb (this description, including its word choice, should be kept in mind further on). The architect likewise covered windows quite often, placing couches in front of them in order to create the interior ‘theatre-boxes’. Although there are many more pedantic quirks, this will end by stating his refusal to draw plans. Largely, the designer aimed to separate the senses as much as possible, to sharpen them by making each one unreliable to the other.
To move through the Wikipedia description, the ‘sex-offender’ point comes up. Loos was found guilty of molesting girls from the age of eight to ten years old, naturally disgracing him. It is a bit of a redundancy for a modernist architect to turn out personally horrid, so this will not be the point of any of this writing. Yet, the ostensibly paradoxical nature of the person who wrote Ornament and Crime, where decór was decried partially for its closeness to sexual indulgence and degeneracy, and a pedofile is to be considered. Sexual anxiety and perversity sits under the skin of the bare and harsh architecture.
Loos was in fact in countermovement with a slice of his contemporaries, which moved toward antisemitism. He was himself a Catholic (even becoming the godfather of Karl Kraus as he converted from Judaism to Catholicism), yet due to his largely Jewish clientele, became tied by association. The cruel case of the Looshaus – commissioned by Goldman & Salatsch – turned into an Opel showroom and bore slogans such as ‘Those of the same blood belong in the same Reich!’.
* * *
Loos was, by almost all means, an excellent writer given that one does not take him to the same level of seriousness as his architecture. Of course, he is not very lighthearted, fun, or comical. When comparing images between him and his sworn enemy, Josef Hoffmann, the latter at the least is able to give out a slight smile. In general, the works of the Secessionists are much more fun and indulgent. Sjoerd van Tuinen argues for the Baroque nature of the Gesamtkunsverk (in the sense of Henri Focillon’s formulation of it), which corresponds to its characterisation by many as indulgent, and sexually deviant. In fact, to make the Secessionists firmly Baroque gives Loos — the most virulent anti-Secessionist — a more total form.
Loos’ most amusing writings are – in this author’s opinion – his writings on fashion, as well as the few and far between pieces of satirical work. Writings on fashion, or about clothing, have the ability to be some of his funniest works around. A shame that style is rarely written about anymore in such a manner, which is naturally a product of the mass production, quick cycle, and quick wear of clothes. Architecture is typically far more comparable to music than it is to clothing. St. Augustine’s conception of beauty is modelled through mathematical means – subsequently applied to both music and building. There is also that infinitely repeated Goethe phrase about how architecture is music, frozen. The building, while being visually decorative, was primarily an acoustic space. Though he was deeply attuned to music (writing a successful operetta review with no formal training), Loos gradually lost his hearing. It is from the need to create a visual rhythm that Loos’ later works come to be understood. Through the impossibility of publishing, the eye becomes the more primary means of experience as the axis of vision becomes arranged. In this sense, Loos is almost narrative in his approach to architectural compositions, as they are born out of the separate arrangement of experience, which is manipulated beyond its natural form.
Ladies' fashion! You disgraceful chapter in the history of civilization! You tell of mankind's secret desires. Whenever we peruse your pages, our souls shudder at the frightful aberrations and scandalous depravities. We hear the whimpering of abused children, the shrieks of maltreated wives, the dreadful outery of tortured men, and the howls of those who have died at the stake. Whips crack, and the air takes on the burnt smell of scorched human flesh. La bête humaine…
No, man is not a beast. Beasts love; they love simply and according to the order-ing of nature. But man misuses his own nature and through it, his own eros. We are beasts that have been penned up in stables, beasts from whom natural nourishment has been withheld, beasts who must love on command. We are domesticated animals.
If man had remained a beast, then the love in his heart would have been aroused once a year. But our sensuality, which we can restrain only with great effort, makes us capable of love at any time. Around the prime of life we are betrayed by it. And our sensuality is not simple but complicated, not natural but against nature.
— Adolf Loos, On Ladies’ Fashion (1898)
Loos is the comical pearl-clutcher, a total misanthrope. I cannot help but find him somewhat similar to Fran Lebowitz at times. Now, it is not unlikely that our ability to find humour in those personalities such as Lebowitz enables us to laugh at Loos, but I choose to believe in the steadfastness and relative universality of humour. Hal Foster wrote on the anal character, as defined by Freud:
“Ornament and Crime” was published in the same year as “Character and Anal Erotism,” where Freud first writes of “the anal character,” specifically of its “reaction-formation” against dirt and shit, which (...) he regards as a fundament of “civilization.” In this respect alone Loos might qualify as an anal character, yet there are discursive connections as well. In a sense, Freud states directly what Loos implies indirectly: on the one hand, that art involves a sublimation of sexual energy, implicitly of anal eroticism (thus his story of the “surplus energy” in primitive and Beethoven alike); and, on the other, that civilization is founded in a renunciation of this sexuality supported by a reaction against anal eroticism.
— Hal Foster, Prosthetic Gods
* * *
The most explicitly modern work of Loos is not necessarily one which most closely follows his strict anti-ornamental impulses, or which folds into the most parallaxes or theatre boxes. His case of celebrity tribute, albeit uncompleted, becomes the sort of exception that makes the rule regarding Loos. While it is uncertain whether they ever formally met, Adolf Loos designed a Paris residence for Josephine Baker. Although never realised, the celebrity tribute stands out as probably the most interesting work by Loos. Its surface is covered in horizontal black and white stripes.
“A horizontal line: the reclining woman. A vertical line: the man who penetrates her”.
— Adolf Loos
The most discussed feature of the house is the indoor swimming pool. Designed to be surrounded entirely by windows, it allows for total visibility of the swimmer, from all angles. Those walking through the floor below the pool watch into it as an aquarium. Loos design for this house, and especially this pool, is ultimately the keystone to his work. It should have a whole separate piece of writing about it, but will instead be left to be explained by what’s been said — a parallax, in a way.
“The water flooded with light, the refreshing swim, the voyeuristic pleasure of underwater exploration—these are the carefully balanced ingredients of this gay architecture. But what matters more is that the invitation to the spectacular suggested by the theme of the house for a cabaret star is handled by Loos with discretion and intellectual detachment, more as a poetic game, involving the mnemonic pursuit of quotations and allusions to the Roman spirit, than as a vulgar surrender to the taste of Hollywood.”
— Benedetto Gravagnuolo
The Baker house represents a shift in the status of the female body. The theater box of the domestic interiors places the woman’s body against the light. She appears as a silhouette, mysterious and desirable, but the backlighting also draws attention to her as a physical volume, a bodily presence within the house, with its own interior. She is both in control of the interior and trapped within it. In the Baker house, the female body is produced as spectacle, the object of an erotic gaze, an erotic system of looks. The exterior of the house cannot be read as a mask designed to conceal its interior; it is a tattooed surface that neither conceals nor reveals. This fetishization of the surface is repeated in the “interior.” In the passages, the visitors consume Baker’s body as a surface adhering to the windows. Like the body, the house is all surface; it does not simply have an interior.
—Beatriz Colomina
“I can feel myself under the gaze of someone whose eyes I do not even see, not even discern. All that is necessary is for something to signify to me that there may be others there. This window, if it gets a bit dark, and if l have reasons for thinking that there is someone behind it, is straightaway a gaze. From the moment this gaze exists, I am already something other, in that I feel myself becoming an object for the gaze of others. But in this position, which is a reciprocal one, others also know that I am an object who knows himself to be seen.”
– Jacques Lacan