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preceding apartment projects. The essay is paired with windows and doors, rather than external
form, because the development in these projects of window typologies that appear in the Müller
House is more readily discerned than an origin of external form. While Loos also dealt with
external form extensively in the projects of the decade following the
Architecture essay, the
articulation of the form of the Müller House can be more readily traced to the projects that pivot
around the publication date of the ‘Art and Architecture’ essay in 1920. The essay further refines
Loos’s argument by attempting to distinguish more explicitly between art, applied art, and
ornament; and discusses architecture’s conflicting requirements to be both practical and useful,
and confronting and challenging. These issues seem more pertinent to the constraints acting on
external form than any of the building elements discussed in the other chapters, and a clear
trajectory can be observed between the external form of the Müller House and the projects that
follow and immediately precede the
essay. The explicit theme of ‘Ornament and Education’ is
architectural training, but the publication date of 1924 coincides with a distinct shift in the spatial
distribution of Loos’s projects. It is in this period that Loos’s projects first display the spatial
complexity that has come to be known as the
Raumplan, and the notion set forward in the
essay—that one cannot be taught to design architecture because artistic ability is innate—
resonates with the emotive and intellectual responses that are elicited by the spaces of Müller
House, and the appearance of related spatial elements in the preceding projects.
The ‘Art and Architecture’ chapter discusses my design research through photographic and
drawn documentation of completed buildings. This structure recognizes the central role of
photography as a design tool—shaping the reception of each project, and consequently the way
in which subsequent buildings are commissioned, designed and constructed.
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As these
photographs are my own or taken under direction, they foreground the issues central to the
design research—by contrast to those that have been commissioned by various publications to
highlight aspects of lifestyle, the clients, or the furnishings. Drawing is utilized to frame the
discussion of space due to the tendency of photography to foreground form, material and light
over the spaces that they define. Each section of photography or drawing acts as the primary
mechanism by which the various aspects of the design research are presented, and is preceded
by a short written discussion that sets out the manner in which my conception of architecture—
as composed of sculptural elements and furnishings—is articulated in relation to each group of
building components. The detached and predominantly descriptive tone of the text is an
extension of the project text that I write at the conclusion of each project in practice so that it can
become part of the design process for the designs that follow. Each chapter investigates an
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George Dodds,
Building Desire: On the Barcelona Pavilion (London:
Routledge, 2005), 7.
Discussing the manner in which photographs of the Barcelona Pavilion have shaped its
reception, Dodds remarks that ‘It is one thing to recognize … that an event may be a prop for its
own representation in another medium; it is quite another to offer up a representation as
evidentiary of the event’s facticity’.
Jonathan Hill,
Actions of Architecture: Architects and Creative Users (London: Routledge,
2003), 21. Hill notes two roles of photography: ‘to present the architectural object as a higher
form of cultural production so as to defend and promote architects and patrons, and to further
the absorption of buildings and architects into commodity production and consumer culture’.
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aspect of Loos’s building and writing, and while photography is also used extensively, it
predominantly serves to illustrate the argument set forward in detail in the accompanying text.
While the vast majority of the photographs presented of the Müller House are my own, a small
number from other sources are included where they offer views of the building that either no
longer exist or are obscured in the current state of the house as a museum. For practical
reasons, most notably the lack of access to their interiors, photography from other sources has
been utilized extensively in relation to Loos’s other projects. As noted throughout, these
photographs are often cropped dramatically to highlight the particular aspect under discussion
and to highlight relationships to the Müller House and the design research. With the exception
of the Müller House, the dates of Loos’s projects are repeated in each paragraph in which they
occur to provide clarity. The appendices comprise a survey of my design work in practice, and a
selection of my own essays on various architectural subjects over the past ten years. These
appendices are intended to offer the reader context for the work that
is presented in the
dissertation, and a mechanism for pursuing other analyses through the same material.
A number of terms used extensively in this dissertation warrant explication and positioning in an
architectural or broader context. Some of this terminology is used by Loos, while some has its
origin in descriptions of my own practice-based design work. Consequently, each of the terms
has a distinct meaning that derives from its origin and specific usage. Furthermore, there are
both overlaps and divergences of Loos’s terminology and my own. Set out below is a brief
discussion of the use of the terms ‘element’, ‘type’, ‘composition’, ‘sculpture’, ‘art’, ‘culture’, and
‘space’.
The term ‘element’ is used—interchangeably with the word ‘component’—in discussions of my
own design work, to refer to visually discrete pieces of buildings. These ‘elements’ are primarily
the categories into which the chapters are divided—walls, floors and ceilings; staircases, joinery
and fixtures; doors and windows; external form; and space. They are posited as ‘elements’ in
the sense that they are aesthetically received as such—not to propose that they are physically
elemental, even from a construction point of view. In other words, these are the visual pieces
that together constitute the perceived whole of the building. Loos does not use the terms
‘element’ or ‘component’, but they are used in this research to refer to his built work. This
deployment of the term ‘element’ is closely linked to some usage of the word ‘type’ in modern
architecture, although the latter term is more often used to refer to use or morphology. This
connection is perhaps best made with reference to Gottfried Semper’s
The Four Elements of
Architecture, which Forty cites in his discussion of ‘type’, remarking that ‘Semper’s project was
“to trace these prototypical forms of architecture”’.
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While focussed on processes, Semper
discusses architectural types in a manner that is analogous to the use of the terms ‘element’
and ‘component’ in this dissertation—terracing (masonry), roofing (carpentry), the hearth
(ceramics), walling (textiles). In relation to the subject of ‘style’, Harry Mallgrave and Michael
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Forty,
Words and Buildings, 306.
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