CURRENTS | Q+A
Reassessing an Uproar in Architecture
Yehuda E. Safran organized the show on Adolf Loos at Columbia.
By MICHAEL Z. WISE
The New York Times: December 4, 2013
Adolf Loos, the enigmatic Moravian-born architect, is better known for his writings than his buildings. A century after the publication of his polemical essay “Ornament and Crime,” a Columbia University exhibition called “Adolf Loos: Our Contemporary” examines his enduring relevance. Loos provoked a furor in 1910 with the severe facade of a men’s tailoring shop and apartment block facing the imperial palace in Vienna. It became known as “the house without eyebrows” for its lack of decoration, and Emperor Franz Josef was said to have drawn his carriage curtains when he rode past. By contrast, Le Corbusier acknowledged the Modern movement’s debt to Loos, saying he “scrubbed under our feet; it was a Homeric cleansing — precise, philosophical and logical.” Yehuda E. Safran, who organized the show, had more to say about him. (This interview has been condensed and edited.)
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From left, a model of “Building H,” by Álvaro Siza, who was inspired by Loos; Loos’s Tristan Tzara House, 15 Avenue Junot in Paris, 1925-6; and Eileen Grey, Three-Story House after Adolf Loos’s Villa Alexander Moissi, Lido de Venezia, Italy, 1923.
Q. You interviewed influential architects around the world about Loos. What did you find?
A. They were united in one thing: that Loos inspired them to keep a critical point of view, to take nothing for granted and to realize that architecture has its value insofar as it is a thought, not merely a thing.
Is this a difficult message now, when buildings are expected to make a huge visual splash?
In this respect Loos’s argument is not popular, but among the best architects it prevails.
Why has “ornament and crime” so often been misunderstood?
The essay developed out of a long series of lectures where he had to defend himself to authorities who refused a permit for the building opposite the palace. The authorities finally agreed to certify the building, provided flowerpots were attached to the windows. The Viennese public perceived the building as a kind of threat to their standing, to their way of life, to their basic beliefs.
Then it was used by modernists to promote minimalist design?
Yes and no, because after all, Loos never argued for the lack of ornament. He argued for the appropriate ornament. He believed it’s better to find the ornament in what exists already, to find ornament in material, for example in the surface of marble, the surface of different woods. If you see the photo of his own apartment, you see the carpets, the curtains, et cetera. One could by no stretch of the imagination see this as a lack of ornament.
Was Loos inconsistent?
There’s no contradiction. When the lack of ornament was more radically taken up by the Bauhaus, Loos was famous for having said that they made the lack of ornament into a new kind of ornament. Loos never contemplated a world bare of ornament.
In a book of essays accompanying the show, the Princeton historian Beatriz Colomina termed Loos’s obsession with design purity a “displacement” related to his sexual proclivities — he was briefly imprisoned for sex with minors — and said his critique of ornamentation stemmed from homophobia. Do you agree?
I love Colomina’s proclivities for gossip and stimulating argument, but it’s totally unfounded. In Loos’s library the most important section was Oscar Wilde, so to say that Loos is homophobic is absurd. He had many liabilities. Nobody could be referred to as without blemish. Who cares that he married three women that were so much younger than him?
What should people take away from this exhibition?
The inspiration for it came from a great Polish man of the theater called Jan Kott, who published in the 1960s an incredible book called “Shakespeare, Our Contemporary.” I have no illusion that Loos is the Shakespeare of architecture, but when you stage a Shakespeare play nowadays, nobody questions the wisdom of it, only what kind of interpretation. And in the most profound sense, the same is true for Loos. It’s very important for a new generation to appreciate how Loos has percolated throughout architecture culture ever since his death in 1933.
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