Adolf Loos

Adolf Loos (December 10, 1870 in Brno, Moravia – August 8, 1933 in Vienna, Austria) was an early-20th-century Viennese modernist architect (associated with the International Style).

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In addition to his built projects, Loos is noted for his essay/manifesto "Ornament and Crime" written in 1908. In this he expressed the idea that the progress of culture is associated with the deletion of ornament from everyday objects, and that it was a crime to force craftsmen or builders to waste their time on ornamentation that served to hasten the time when an object was obsolete. Accordingly, the most primitive societies use a lot of decoration and the most advanced societies have no superfluous ornament, or at least there is benefit in suppressing ornamentation which serves no useful purpose. In the same essay Loos asserted that "All art is erotic," and that a European man who tattoos himself is either a criminal or a degenerate; if a tattooed man dies out of prison, Loos reasoned, it is only because he did not live long enough to commit his inevitable murder.

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This essay is a repudiation of the work of the Vienna Secession, the Austrian version of Art Nouveau. Loos' provocative catch-phrase was taken up by the Modern Movement in architecture, the other famous catch-phrase of which is "form follows function". Ironically, in the years between 1893 and 1896 Loos lived and worked in United States, at one point holding a position in the office of Louis Sullivan (according to Robert Hughes's "Shock of the New").

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Loos is also known for his notorious entry to the 1922 Chicago Tribune competition, which took the form of a single colossal Doric column.

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December 10: December 10 is the 344th day (345th in leap years) of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 21 days remaining in the year....

1870: 1870 was a common year starting on Saturday (see link for calendar)....

Brno: Brno (-Czech, German: Br?nn) is the second-largest city of the Czech Republic, located in the southeast of the country, at the confluence of the Svitava and Svratka rivers....

Adolf Loos related Images and Photos (experimental)

Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall	Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus German Chemist	Richard Adolf Zsigmondy German Chemist	Portrait of Adolf Duke of Hesse-Nassau (1817-1895)
Gustav IV Adolf's Visit to the Academy of Fine Arts in 1797	Ferdinand Adolf August Heinrich Graf Von Zeppelin German Soldier Aviator and Airship Constructor	David Simpson Piper of the Black Watch Leads the Charge at Loos But is Killed Almost at Once	Esaias Tegner Engraved by Isaac Wilhelm Tegner and Johann Adolf Kittendorff