Book: Adolf Loos, Works

The evolution of Adolf Loos from a free and easy commercially-orientated architect, responsible for lavishly reflective shop interiors and apartments with ultra-thick shagpile carpets, into a standard-bearer for white-walled, pared-down minimalism is a curious one.

Despite a career that included over 50 apartment interiors, 32 shops, cafés and bars and 19 houses, built and unbuilt, Loos is still best known for a vitriolic essay he published in 1908, Ornament and Crime, which seemed to equate the fashion for elaborate decoration with cultural and social decline, even criminal immorality.

Seized on by the emerging Modern Movement as evidence of the innate rightness of their approach, the truth is that Loos liked his luxury. The interiors on show in this fine monograph are almost artery-clogging in their richness. Above all, they demonstrate that if the craft behind the construction is sound, then almost anything goes.

8 November 2007 | Design