Adolf Loos

Adolf Loos – Avantgardist und Storenfried im Wien der Secessionisten Erst legte er sich mit den biedersinnigen Freunden des Historismus und der Wiener Ringstra?en-Architektur an, dann mit den Secessionisten, mit denen er gerade noch paktiert hatte: Nike Wagner zitiert in „Geist und Geschlecht“, ihrem Standardwerk zu Karl Kraus und der Wiener Moderne, einen Zeitgenossen von Adolf Loos (1870–1933), der den Architekten, Designer und Publizisten als den „Mann, der Nein sagt“ charakterisierte. Und kaum jemand sagte mit mehr avantgardistischem Furor Nein als Loos: Nein zum Ornament, zum dekorativen Beiwerk, zu uberflussigen Details, zum fantastischen Wuchern des Irrationalen. Als Architekt der Tabula rasa propagierte Loos eine Architektur der Einfachheit und Klarheit, in der die Form der Funktion folgt, aber durchaus luxuriosen Uberfluss und das Spiel mit klassizistischen Elementen zulasst. Programmatisch ist sein Vortrag Ornament und Verbrechen (1913), in dem er in nietzscheanischer Erregungs- und Uberwaltigungsprosa gegen den antiquierten Unverstand seiner Zeitgenossen wettert. Schon zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts hatte der Freund von Karl Kraus, Peter Altenberg und Oskar Kokoschka die Gelegenheit erhalten, seine Ideen auch baulich Gestalt werden zu lassen. Die schlicht-funktionalen Innenraumgestaltungen, die er fur das Cafe Museum (1899), fur die American Bar (1908) oder das Modehaus Knize (1913) entwarf, bruskierten in ihrer fremdartigen modernen Anmutung die Wiener. Auch sein wohl beruhmtestes Bauwerk in Wien, das als Looshaus bekannte gro?e Geschaftshaus am Michaelerplatz (1912) gegenuber der Nordfassade der Hofburg, wurde mit seiner nuchternen, aber dennoch exklusiv-eleganten Fassade als Provokation empfunden und soll sogar Kaiser Franz Joseph I. derart in Rage versetzt haben, dass er sich fortan weigerte, einen Fu? auf den Michaelerplatz zu setzen. Das Looshaus wie auch einige der zahlreichen Villen, die er baute, etwa die kubistische Villa Muller in Prag, gelten als Schlusselwerke der Moderne. Diese Einfuhrung macht mit den architektonischen Ideen von Adolf Loos vertraut, erlautert sein Konzept des „Raumplans“, stellt seine wichtigsten Werke vor und beschreibt das Leben eines streitbaren, aber auch abgrundigen Intellektuellen am Beginn der Moderne.

• 2020 is the 150th anniversary of Adolf Loos’ birth and his name will be in the public eye through press and events.

• Accessibly priced paperback of a Loosian love story is more than an architecture biography – it’s a story about the private life and bizarre mores of a genius as seen through the eyes of his wife, who was 34 years his junior.

• Famous personalities from the 1920s and 1930s are peppered throughout the book: Josephine Baker, Henri Matisse, Karl Kraus, Oskar Kokoschka, Tristan Tzara, Erich Maria Remarque, Josef Roth, Charlie Chaplin, Arnold Schoenberg, and more.

• Bizarre stories with cinematic brevity and absurd situations: Imagine your husband introducing you completely naked to his subordinate carpenter in the pool of the Viennese Nudist League, where they proceed to discuss business. Imagine him buying out an entire concert hall and giving away tickets on the street to introduce the common man to Schoenberg’s atonal music. Imagine a man who reads the encyclopedia for amusement, front to back.

• Claire Beck’s documentation has ensured that Loos’ identity would not live on solely in the static shapes of architecture or through his essays, but as a man with a particular temperament and quirks that informed his genius.

• Photographs by Claire show another dimension to the love story: that he was her subject, and that part of her interest in him was also artistic, which informed her future photographic activities.

• Like a box of chocolates, this is a biography that's easy and fun to read piece by piece, a little at a time, or to devour all at once. It consists of more than five dozen short stories, some the length of a paragraph, some several pages.

• New insights gained into Loos projects through their creation stories: the unrealized black-and-white striped marble house for Josephine Baker (1928) with its dramatic lighting and view into the swimming pool, for example, or the interior of the Villa Müller (1928–30) in Prague with green marble imagined by Loos as a visual rhyme with shimmering fish.

• Loos’ philosophy and his spatial modeling system of the Raumplan — open-space architecture conceived in three-dimensions — is taught in every architecture school. His name is instantly recognizable and suggests controversy, innovation, and intrigue.

• Essays by Loos in the appendix give insight into how these controversies were established — by Loos himself, a provocateur and cultural critic.

• The book reflects not just Claire’s experience but also the zeitgeist that brought this Modern master to the fore and benefitted from his radical vision. He advocated a «socialist» future where every proletariat, through architecture, could become a liberated sophisticate.

• A traveling exhibition of the Western Bohemian Writers Society has introduced Claire and this book around Europe for the last two years, with several articles about her appearing in magazines with monthly circulations of 65,000-100,000. They are trying to get the show to London for 2020, which would create a natural market for this book.

• During his lifetime Loos designed, built, and remodeled close to one hundred apartments and homes, and undertook a number of large civic projects like schools, government buildings, and workers’ housing. Dozens of additional works include sanatoriums, hotels, shops, cafés and bars — notably Vienna's American Bar, featuring colorful stained glass and a death-defying marble ceiling that has never fallen down.

• While related to the hardcover edition, this is a streamlined version of that book geared to a larger market, with 40 illustrations, including unseen documents. Some photographs are by Claire, some are of the two of them together, and one, never before published seems to have been taken by Loos of the author. Altogether they illustrate the theatricality of their relationship and suggest Loos as a character for a film or TV series that has never, surprisingly, been attempted, though it has apparently been discussed.

• Informative supplemental material enlarges the story beyond Loos by providing details about the author from family archives, love letters from Loos, and what is known about Claire and her photography practice before her untimely death in the Holocaust.

Книга Ins Leere gesprochen. 1897-1900. Adolf Loos изготавливается по вашему заказу, печатается на цифровом оборудовании. Особенности изданий и материалы для книг: используется импортная белая офсетная бумага, плотностью 80 гр/м2. экземпляры до 32 страниц скреплены скрепкой. издания больше 32 страниц имеют проклеенный переплёт. Каждый заказ обрабатывается индивидуально: книги снабжаются уникальным номером. Эта книга представляет собой перепечатку подлинного издания (издательство Berlin, Verlag Der Sturm, 1921 год), основанную на электронном дубликате высококачественного разрешения, которую обработали вручную от пятен, клякс, перегибов, оставив структуру и орфографию. Книги не пользующиеся известностью, изданные с петровских времен до наших дней, вновь доступны для заказа в виде печатных.

Adolf Loos (1870–1933) was a flamboyant character whose presence in the cultural hotbed of early 1900s Vienna galvanized the country’s architectural landscape. An early, impassioned advocate of modernism, he all-out rejected the grand Secessionist aesthetic prevalent at the time, as well as any hallmarks of the European fin de siècle.Instead, in lectures and essays, such as the milestone Ornament and Crime of 1908, Loos articulated his “passion for smooth and precious surfaces.” He advocated that architectural ornamentation was, by its nature, ephemeral—locked into current trends and styles, and therefore quickly dated. Loos, himself a Classicist at heart, argued instead for simple, timeless designs with time-honored aesthetic and structural qualities.In this essential introduction, we explore Loos’s writings, projects, and legacy, from his key concept of “spatial plan” architecture to his rejection of decorative fripperies in favor of opulent, fine-quality materials and crisp lines. Featured projects include Vienna’s Café Museum (1899), the fashion store Knize (1913), and the controversial Loos House (1912), which Emperor Franz Joseph I would refuse to travel past, bristling with rage at its insolently minimalist aesthetic.

Adolf Loos (1870–1933) was a flamboyant character whose presence in the cultural hotbed of early 1900s Vienna galvanized the country’s architectural landscape. An early, impassioned advocate of modernism, he all-out rejected the grand Secessionist aesthetic prevalent at the time, as well as any hallmarks of the European fin de siècle.Instead, in lectures and essays, such as the milestone Ornament and Crime of 1908, Loos articulated his “passion for smooth and precious surfaces.” He advocated that architectural ornamentation was, by its nature, ephemeral—locked into current trends and styles, and therefore quickly dated. Loos, himself a Classicist at heart, argued instead for simple, timeless designs with time-honored aesthetic and structural qualities.In this essential introduction, we explore Loos’s writings, projects, and legacy, from his key concept of “spatial plan” architecture to his rejection of decorative fripperies in favor of opulent, fine-quality materials and crisp lines. Featured projects include Vienna’s Café Museum (1899), the fashion store Knize (1913), and the controversial Loos House (1912), which Emperor Franz Joseph I would refuse to travel past, bristling with rage at its insolently minimalist aesthetic.