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Adolf Loos |
We begin with Adolf Loos, the "unclassifiable" giant of early modernism. Loos, an Austrian, possessed a fundamentally different outlook on architecture than many of his contemporaries. Though he vehemently eschewed ornament and held the industrial zeitgeist as an ideal, he did not seek to create a style of architecture. He felt that to be cognizant of creating a style was to make architecture artificial and to end up with the same sort of historical hodge-podge that the other modernists so detested of their predecessors. No, Loos was not interested in style per se, but in the deliberate evolution of architecture toward its true ends.
“The present constructs itself on the past just as the past constructed itself on the preceding past. It has never been another way – nor will it ever be any other way.” - Adolf Loos
Adolf Loos' buildings thus follow the above formulation. They are built upon the past as a type of evolutionary object, leading organically to the architecture of the future. For Loos, it was inconceivable to "jump" to a new style that exists only as some philosophical ideal. His intent was to build his way from the past, thus creating the new style by the very act of building.
These baseline ideas are key to understanding Loos' philosophy in residential architecture. Another layer we must consider, however, is how Loos reacted to other architects of his day whom he felt were not following a similar trajectory of building the future based on the past. He was diametrically opposed to the architects of the Viennese Secession (an Austrian variant of the Jugendstil), whom he felt relied entirely on ornament and not enough on true, simple materials. Thus, we find in Loos' houses a minimalistic treatment of the surfaces - the material selection is what gives character to the spaces.
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Villa Müller, Prague |
The plan of the Villa Müller exhibits one of Loos' novel inventions, the Raumplan. The Raumplan is a system of spatial organization that Loos used in many of his homes. Its execution relied on spaces that stepped up and down into other spaces, allowing for an implied hierarchy to be evident in each space within the house. Loos said of the Raumplan:
"My architecture is not conceived in plans, but in spaces (cubes). I do not design floor plans, facades, sections. I design spaces. For me, there is no ground floor, first floor etc.... For me, there are only contiguous, continual spaces, rooms, anterooms, terraces etc. Storeys merge and spaces relate to each other. Every space requires a different height: the dining room is surely higher than the pantry, thus the ceilings are set at different levels. To join these spaces in such a way that the rise and fall are not only unobservable but also practical, in this I see what is for others the great secret, although it is for me a great matter of course. Coming back to your question, it is just this spatial interaction and spatial austerity that thus far I have best been able to realise in Dr Müller's house"
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Plan of the Villa Müller: notice the half-levels present |
On a similar mental trajectory as Loos were the architects involved in the exhibition of the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart. Present were many of the great personalities of mid-century modernism: Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Peter Behrens. The Weissenhofsiedlung was planned as a display for utopian modernist residential design. Each architect invited to the exhibition was given a site to design a house. Contrary to Loos' methodology, the architects present at the Weissenhofsiedlung (many were members of the German Werkbund) were indeed interested in attempting to manufacture a new, international, industrially-inspired style.
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House 10 by Victor Bourgeois, Weissenhofsiedlung, Stuttgart |
Van de Velde's influence can be felt in much of Bourgeois' aesthetic. The design of House 10 is a simple, unadorned rectangle, with a few curvilinear projections (perhaps vestiges of the Art Nouveau?). This is a house that is trying really hard to be modern. It is minimalist in its use of diverse materials, unlike Loos' more nuanced position of greater diversity of material palette in the private realm. The plan is straightforward and quite open (at least on the third floor). The building is divided rationally and completely among the three floors, precluding any imaginative spatial configurations a la the Raumplan.
Plan of House 10 |
This is not to say that Loos' methodology and work are superior to that of Bourgeois, but simply to show that they arrived at similar places by taking different paths. Bourgeois focused on the simple geometries of square and circle, and let them stand for themselves as gestures. Loos manipulated three dimensional space and then enclosed it in an austere box. The methods mutually enriched one another and eventually bore fruit in the pure simplicity of later modernist architecture (SOM, Philip Johnson, etc.). But, in any event, after the construction of Villa Müller and the exhibition at Weissenhofsiedlung, we were well on the way to the manifestation of the house as the ultimate industrial machine - the machine for living.
It is my opinion that Loos had the more valid methodology, though I disagree with his theories on the inherent evils of ornament. His idea that architecture should naturally evolve and not seek to be a "newness" unto itself seems quite valid to me. On the other hand, what the Werkbund did at Weissenhofsiedlung seems forced and artificial. It was exhibition after all. They were attempting to create something new and exciting and idealistic. Meanwhile, Loos was still trudging down the road of real life, real history and real change.
References and Further Reading
Discussion of the Raumplan in the Villa Müller
The Deutscher Werkbund, Adolf Loos, and the Problems of Ornament and Style in the 20th Century
Weissenhofsiedlung
Ornament and Crime by Adolf Loos