ART AND FUNCTION
25
inevitably shaped the widespread perception of Loos—before proceeding to outline the way in
which a number of the same assumptions underpin a diverse range of academic articles on
Loos. In spite of the diverse range of their perspectives, most of these books and articles are
premised on the assumption that Loos opposed the use of ornament outright and that his writing
and buildings sit comfortably with a conception of modernism founded on issues of function,
technology, structure and social change. The contemporary widespread view of Loos has been
greatly influenced by the opinions of Kenneth Frampton, and his views have unsurprisingly
incorporated Loos’s writing and buildings in the relatively linear progression of modernism—
based on function and other practical concerns—that Frampton sets forth in his seminal
A
History of Modern Architecture.
Introducing the 1985 book
Adolf Loos, by Yehuda Safran, Wilfried Wang and Mildred Budny,
Frampton demonstrates considerable bias towards consideration of the spatial development of
Loos’s projects. Casting the
Raumplan in a modernist
light of social reform, Frampton posits
Loos’s spatial arrangements as ‘an architectural strategy for transcending the contradictory
cultural legacy of bourgeois society, which, having deprived itself of the vernacular, could not
claim in exchange the culture of Classicism’.
8
Similarly, in referring to the fact that Loos’s un-
built, stepped terrace section model was widely adopted in Germany, Frampton remarks upon
the irony of Loos’s effect on the underprivileged as a bourgeois architect.
9
In relation to Loos’s
design of space, Frampton concludes simply that ‘Loos must now be seen as the first to
postulate the problem that Le Corbusier was eventually to resolve with his full development of
the free plan’.
10
With regard to Loos’s building forms, Frampton speculates that ‘the typological
issue posited by Loos was how to combine the propriety of Platonic mass with the convenience
of irregular volume’, suggesting that efficiency of spatial arrangement is the motivation for
Loos’s planning, of which the building form is simply a consequence.
11
Aligning Loos tidily with
Le Corbusier, Frampton remarks that Loos’s forms also exhibit ‘that impulse to synthesize, at
every conceivable scale, the “type-objects” of the modern world’.
12
However, Frampton does
note in the work of Loos ‘the ready-made sensibility of Marcel Duchamp’,
13
and describes Loos
‘as part of a circle of personalities who made a significant impression on the cultural and
intellectual character of the period’.
14
Frampton’s fleeting and relatively unexplored recognition
of the connection of Loos’s work to culture, intellect, and art is one of the starting points for this
research project.
Writing a decade later, in the introduction to Roberto Schezen’s
Adolf Loos: Architecture 1903-
1932, Frampton devotes considerably more time to the consideration of Loos’s form-making.
8
Kenneth Frampton, introduction to
The Architecture of Adolf Loos: An Arts Council Exhibition,
by Yehuda Safran, Wilfried Wang, and Mildred Budny (London: Arts Council of Great Britain,
Precision Press, 1985), 12.
9
Frampton, introduction to
Adolf Loos,
by Safran, Wang, and Budny, 12.
10
Frampton, introduction to
Adolf Loos, by Safran, Wang, and Budny, 12.
11
Frampton, introduction to
Adolf Loos, by Safran, Wang, and Budny, 12.
12
Frampton, introduction to
Adolf Loos, by Safran, Wang, and Budny, 12.
13
Frampton, introduction to
Adolf Loos, by Safran, Wang, and Budny, 12.
25
ART AND FUNCTION
26
However, Frampton’s view of Loos’s spatial arrangements appears unchanged, describing Loos
as caught between ‘the infinite, modernizing thrust of American civilization and the tradition of
European culture’,
15
and presuming Modernist motivations of social reform for Loos’s work—
‘the progressive resistance of the housing authority to all of Loos’s attempts to evolve a duplex
typology for the urban working class alienated him from the bureaucrats of Red Vienna’.
16
Frampton acknowledges that Loos’s form-making is a reaction to the cultural environment of
over-exuberant Secessionist Vienna—observing that Loos’s sparse forms can be understood as
silence, and that, ‘This silence spoke of the gap between fact and value as precisely and
paradoxically as Wittgenstein’s distinction between the
sayable and the
unsayable’.
17
The
‘silence’ of Loos’s architecture is placed by Frampton in the context of
Sprachkritik, a critique of
the misuse of language by liberal press originating in ‘a neo-Kantian interrogation of language
as the supposed bearer of rational thought’.
18
Frampton cites Paul Engelmann,
a pupil of Loos
and a Wittgenstein collaborator as remarking that Loos ‘believed that all that really matters in
human life is precisely what, in his view, we must be silent about’
19
—and notes ‘Loos’
insistence, after Wittgenstein … on the fact that there is no single universal language, in
architecture or in anything else’.
20
The consideration of Loos’s architecture as a form of art in
this research project is framed by this recognition by Frampton that Loos’s work is a cultural
endeavour, connected with the philosophy of Wittgenstein and Engelmann, and the sparse
music of Loos’s friend, composer Arnold Schönberg. Frampton’s remark that ‘Loos was
conscious of photography as a new expressive medium, suspended like his interiors between
illusion and reality, as his early use of photomontage would indicate’,
21
also provides some
support for the notion that Loos’s architecture could be understood as a form of art. However,
Frampton seems to take literally Loos’s proclamations on the limits of art in architecture, despite
acknowledging that his architecture is ‘proto-Dadaesque’
22
and continues to attempt to subsume
Loos’s work into a single trajectory of Modernist architecture, commenting that ‘there is little
reason to doubt that the influence of Loos was decisive in refining the typological programme of
Purism’.
23
The fact that Frampton is highly critical of Loos’s proto-postmodernist Doric column
design for the Chicago Tribune tower competition,
24
also indicates a desire to suppress
elements of Loos’s work that do not sit comfortably with his presentation of Loos in a linear
development of modernism. The notion espoused in this research that Loos proposed a theory
of architecture drawn from the process of making architecture in practice is to some extent
supported by Frampton’s recognition that Loos was less inclined to draw than to spend time on
14
Frampton, introduction to
Adolf Loos, by Safran, Wang, and Budny, 14.
15
Frampton, Introduction to
Adolf Loos: Architecture 1903–1932, by Roberto Schezen
(New
York: Monacelli Press, 1996), 20.
16
Frampton, introduction to
Architecture 1903–1932, 21.
17
Frampton, introduction to
Architecture 1903–1932, 15.
18
Frampton, introduction to
Architecture 1903–1932, 14.
19
Frampton, introduction to
Architecture 1903–1932, 14. Citing Englemann.
20
Schezen,
Architecture 1903–1932, 18.
21
Frampton, introduction to
Architecture 1903–1932, 18.
22
Frampton, introduction to
Architecture 1903–1932, 17.
23
Frampton, introduction to
Adolf Loos, by Safran, Wang, and Budny, 12.
24
Frampton, introduction to
Architecture 1903–1932, 20.
26