Adolf Loos (10 December 1870 – 23 August 1933) was one of the most important and influential Austrian and Czechoslovak architects of European Modern architecture. In his essay Ornament and Crime he repudiated the florid style of the Vienna Secession, the Austrian version of Art Nouveau. In this and many other essays he contributed to the elaboration of a body of theory and criticism of Modernism in architecture.
Born in 1870 in Brno, Moravia, Loo...
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Adolf Loos (10 December 1870 – 23 August 1933) was one of the most important and influential Austrian and Czechoslovak architects of European Modern architecture. In his essay Ornament and Crime he repudiated the florid style of the Vienna Secession, the Austrian version of Art Nouveau. In this and many other essays he contributed to the elaboration of a body of theory and criticism of Modernism in architecture.
Born in 1870 in Brno, Moravia, Loos was only nine when his stonemason father died. A rebellious boy who rather lost his bearings, he failed in various attempts to get through architecture school. Contracting syphilis in the brothels of Vienna, by 21 he was sterile and in 1893 his mother disowned him. He went to America for three years, and did odd jobs in New York, somehow finding himself in that process and returning to Vienna in 1896 a man of taste and intellectual refinement, immediately entering the fashionable Viennese intelligentsia. His friends included Ludwig...
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