ADOLF LOOS

To mark his 150th birthday, the MAK is devoting an exhibition to Adolf Loos (1870–1933), one of the most important pioneers of modernism in architecture. 

 

The exhibition’s almost 100 design drawings, plans, photographs, and models from the Albertina’s Adolf Loos Archive examine both his planned and completed works and focus on his private residential buildings: single-family homes, villas, and country residences for a bourgeois, frequently Jewish, clientele—but also for artists and literary figures. As a contrast, important social projects such as housing for the Wiener Siedlungswerk cooperative, the municipality of Vienna, and the Austrian Werkbund are also presented.2

In designing his private residential buildings, Loos developed the concept of the Raumplan (lit.: “spatial plan”), in which the floors were not simply “layered” on top of each other. Instead, each room was given the height and dimensions necessary for its intended use.  Projects planned according to this system between 1903 and 1931, such as houses for Dadaist Tristan Tzara and singer-dancer Josephine Baker in Paris, master builder František Müller in Prague, and textile manufacturer Hans Moller in Vienna, still number among the world’s foremost private homes of the 20th-century.