ADOLF LOOS

Summary of: The Urn and the Chamberpot: Adolf Loos 1900-30



Summary of: The Urn and the Chamberpot: Adolf Loos 1900-30

In this chapter, author discussed Adolf Loos in detail. The author highlighted various aspects of his life, his personality and his work. Author of this book begin his comments in the chapter by defining his early life. He mentioned that Adolf Loos was an Austro-Hungarian architect born in Moravian. Adolf Loos argued with the modernists, who were known as the Vienna Secession and presented an antagonistic view of architecture, which is considered one of the forerunners of architectural rationalism (Colquhoun, 2000, pp. 73-87).

Loos was in contact with the avant-garde European art of his time like Schoenberg, Kokoschka and Tristan-Tzara. Its architecture is functional, taking into account the qualities of supplementary materials pulled out from his Theory of architecture). For Loos, the architecture is different from the applied arts as he consider architecture as the mother of every art, and included only the cemeteries and memorials in his structures (Colquhoun, 2000, pp. 73-87).

Adolf introduced a new concept in his works, "Raumplan." The concept is that Loos assign Raumplan to each of the rooms, space which has a different significance. He claimed that a bedroom, for example, has the same importance as a living room. In accordance with Loos, the importance of the rooms depends on their size and ceiling height. Loos rooms placed along an imaginary axis in the house as if it will roll into a spiral. Each room was for the purposes for which they should serve (Colquhoun, 2000, pp. 73-87). Thus, the living room, where social activities take place, is a huge and beautiful space. Instead, the children's bedroom belongs to the private part of the house, and, therefore, does not need ten-foot ceilings.

In 1899, the Viennese architecture was ...