LOOS

Extremely different, almost completely opposite, is the idea of architecture developed by the
Viennese architect Adolf Loos (1870-1933).
In a landscape of new decorative arts produced in Europe, and known under different names
-Modernism, Jugendstil, Art Nouveau, Floreale, etc.- in Vienna new artistic forms were flowering,
ranging from furniture to architecture. This movement is known as Sezession. In this context, the
architectural work and the writings of Adolf Loos mean a profound reaction to the decorative mess.
Through articles in the press, an ephemeral architecture magazine and his lectures and books,
Loos not only represents a warning sign to what we might call the modern way of design but also
involves a touch of attention to what is essential and what is banal in architecture.
The reception of Loos's work had an impact in many innovative positions, which makes his
thoughts and work not to be considered those of an outsider, but rather the opposite. His repeated
and controversial appeal to the essentials of architecture still has an obvious resonance in many of
the more recent controversies. Initially created as a conference and later summarized as a text
published in 1910 in Vienna and Paris, and in French in 1913, the text Architecktur begins and
ends with the description of a situation and a landscape:
"Would you like to accompany me to the shore of a mountain lake?". So the text speaks about the
vision of a building under construction on the shore of a lake. It is a stridency, something that
breaks the peace, calm and beauty of the landscape. Behind this attack on good taste there is a
dangerous individual, an architect who wanted to design this building. While handmade houses,
farms and chapels are part of the landscape, the architect's work is strange, aggressive and ugly.

The conclusion that Loos aims to reach, as in other texts, is that the world of everyday things,
houses, clothes, shoes, etc., doest not need the world of architecture. This world is the result of a
slow process that configures a trade. Trades have been decanting the good way of doing everyday
things around us, with much more modest claims than creating a work of art, applying
methodologies or universal formal repertoires . Architecture, extended everywhere, is a danger to
civilization,a cultural decline.
Opposed to the description of the house under construction on the lake, Loos proposes another
picture, a few pages later the same article:
"If while walking through the forest, we found a pile of stones disposed in pyramidal form, not
more than two meters long and one meter wide, then we'll stop seriously and feel from within
ourselves a voice telling us: a person has been buried here. This is architecture. "
For Loos architecture occurs only when it is able to awaken moods, precise experiences of the
spirit. The moment we relate what an architectural work expresses -small or large, domestic
or monumental to the values that support our behavior, then we are facing a truly architectural
fact..