Cuando los padres han construido todo, a los hijos solo les queda derrumbarlo.
Karl Kraus en Die Fackel
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En 1959, la revista Casabella publicaba un número monográfico sobre el arquitecto austriaco Adolf Loos. En ese número se presentaba su obra de arquitectura a partir an extensive research paper of Aldo Rossi, at that time that Italian publication editor.
Rossi said there that architecture has always been an expression, including through its contradictions, of the ruling class of his time, since due to economic determinants is no imaginable political opposition to do architecture. "
funny thing is that the intellectual attitude of Loos was mostly opposition-architecture through its continuous-critical comments at various schools and established dominant groups in their environment. First against the aesthetic conservatism Vienna in the late nineteenth century and its unconditional support to the historicism that has been exemplified by the large collection of buildings in the Ring and then against renewing the first generation of Austrian architecture, structured around the movement of Secezion Otto Wiener Wagner and his acolytes.
The formality of the building for the headquarters of Secession, by Joseph Maria Olbrich in Vienna Karlsplatz, condense Loos reflected the contradiction between seeking an aesthetic alternative to historicism in architecture and decorative emphasis the need for new form of expression with the times to come.
According tells the writer and critic George Steiner in an extraordinary article in 1979 for the New Yorker magazine entitled Wien, Wien, nur du allein (Vienna, Vienna, only you) should have an extraordinary book that is not yet been written which show that the essence of the culture that has developed simultaneously had its origin in the constellation of divergent that accumulated in the intellectual circles of the city of Vienna in the early twentieth century. Both philosophy and the latest novels, music, painting, sociology, economics, etc., Etc. debtor would be thinking of the many characters who invariably found in that city, those years. A trio of friends who anticipate and catalyze many artistic events, stands on the blocks for thinkers: Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos and Arnold Schoenberg.
satirical practice Karl Kraus had on his contemporaries, on that next company, also exemplify the method of radical doubt about everything that is given from a blind faith in established authority and rationality. Schoenberg and his disciples, Alban Berg and Anton Webern would explore in the paucity of their proposals, the musical boundaries of a time that was over. And finally, Adolf Loos would open the door to the design of a new architecture without attributes, naked and relieved of that conception Viennese decor that I hate.
building for the headquarters of the Wiener Secezion. Joseph Maria Olbrich, architect.
Loos, who never earned an academic degree, always aspired to greater radicalism that deprives the art fixtures and decorative nature and could anticipate more serenely the appropriate expression for a turbulent period. His fight against all types of architecture was masked in decorativism an example of the way it should luego transitar toda la vanguardia organizada alrededor del Movimiento Moderno. Le Corbusier, entre otros, lo consideraba un ejemplo inestimable y, de hecho, lo imitaría descaradamente en sus proyectos de villas en la primera época de su estancia parisina. Panelado interior de madera de caoba en la tienda de complementos para caballeros de Goldmann&Salatsch. Adolf Loos, interiorista, 1904.
En el pequeño excurso de 1898, Die kranken ohren Beethovens (Los oídos enfermos de Beethoven), Loos se quejaba de la extrema incomprensión de los contemporáneos hacia la obra innovadora del verdadero artista. Para él, lo nuevo necesita un tiempo for assimilation, which inevitably generate social estrangement precursor of the new forms, located in unknown territory beyond the established taste. A stigma that grips those from the seek greater knowledge and genius to anticipate the avant-garde artistic expression. Although he wrote these ideas in support of the atonal music of Arnold Schoenberg and young against bourgeois rejection of the Vienna of his time, probably as a reflection would also address the social denial of its own architecture. In another text
1898, Die stadt potemkinsche (Potemkin City), Loos expressed its total opposition, almost contempt, the new urban architecture in Vienna. The romantic historicism, neo-Gothic, neoclassical, etc. Ring of responding to a formal request to mimic oriented styles of the past few, envied by newcomers to the ostentation and luxury that wealth confers. According to their argument, these new buildings be evidence of the fraudulence of a parvenu class which prefers falsehood and lies to the true expression of contemporary art. To do this provided a parallel to the imaginary constructions that Prince Grigori Potemkin prepared for Catherine the Great in the plains of Ukraine, some huge sets in which subjects present some assumptions a few villages and flourishing cities that were simple cardboard stage machinery and fabrics. He considered that counterfeiting scenographic Viennese architecture was intended to be palatial would be like a scam. For Loos, compared to the fetishism of the past, the moral obligation of the architecture would be in the relentless pursuit of style according to each time that, in its formal and technological inevitability, could convey the force of the social spirit that corresponds to that specific time .
In his famous text Ornament und Verbrechen (Ornament and Crime), presented to the meeting The Werkbund in 1908, then setting out a radical way the need to strip the art and architecture and decorative spurs last recover the essence of the building as an aesthetic foundation for honest and realistic. There was a comparison between the Aboriginal tattooed and modern dandy as examples of ethical relativity and the need for language and contemporary expression is released from unnecessary attachments. For Loos, cultural evolution would be to gradually eliminate the decoration of objects and spaces around us, both in everyday use as in architecture. An item of interest in the friendly relationship between Kraus and Loos is in contrast to their parallel efforts in the realm of words, language as an expression of the ephemeral imperfect face the reality of art that refuses. So while Karl Kraus patiently built ironic critique of Viennese society in the journal Die Fackel (The Torch) over 900 numbers and 37 years of continuous efforts, the publication of Loos, Das Andere (The Other) only have two editions in 1903 and was consumed in its insignificance as a means of communicating their ideas.
The result of those deliberations, specifically in some of his works residential and commercial, would achieve a high degree of refinement that would anticipatory misunderstood by most of his countrymen. The now famous and valued building for Goldman and Salatsch tailoring, Michaelerplatz in Vienna, completed in 1911, would receive over the first decades of the twentieth century, the motto of the house without eyebrows for its lack of decorative elements in their own bland facades. According to popular legend, the emperor Franz Joseph reject this work and prevent its completion, not to see him leave the city for the door to that place, from their habitual residence in the Hofburg.
However, the attitude of Loos in Michaelerhaus visceral rejection was not the way of construction of the historic city. Simply, to a deeper reflection on the relevant components of Viennese architecture legacy to pass to extract its most essential elements. The shape of the vertical composition, arrangement of holes and foundations, the use of glass display cases and counters along the sidewalks, but would not comment on the tradition. It would therefore be a self-explanation on how things could be made anew without renouncing the previously deposited there. That is, the effort to establish a rich dialogue that did not involve the perpetuation of imitation and forgery.
According Loos, the architecture should be considered as an activity weighted by contingency. The building must meet in the first instance a basic utility and, therefore, for the Viennese philosopher, perhaps, an intellectual fact, more related to craftsmanship than to art itself. For our hero, the architecture is defined by the chains of the practical and submission to a specific assignment. The difference between art and architecture lie in the possible release of their players, while the artist can express his obsessions in an unrestricted, the architect must undergo a very specific boundary conditions that restrict expression. Conditions that apply to both geography and functionality as the technical and material economy. Some bounded margins which give the architect a role that artistic craftsmanship.
According to the philosopher Massimo Cacciari Loos in his reflection on the work of art begins in the realm of personal liberty and thorough knowledge of the inherited language. From there faces the challenge of exploring the past, bringing the accumulated knowledge in crisis and thus placed in an offshore position, one that relates to the discovery that space is based on deeper understanding of words and phrases originating of their specialty. The point of art is a risky moment of maximum disruption and that its uniqueness is not easily reproducible.
Building for Goldman & Michaelerplatz Salatsch in Vienna. Adolf Loos, 1904
However 
However
and so for Loos, architecture can only reach the stage art in only two situations, referred to the monument and the tomb.
is why, in his grave, Loos disclaims any ornament, the maximum stripping language advocates as a way of opening up a new world of artistic space that possible because is unique. The uniqueness of this event space, which is expressed in his case in a cube of granite one meter by one meter by one meter, is the place where they expected the limit to reach the future, with the total renunciation of the expression and listening to what is beyond our reach.
thus seem that the aesthetic response to contemporary artistic impossibility of architecture should be in the abdication of all desire expressive. This could be the most important legacy that Antiwiener pointed has left us for more than a century.
Tomb Adolf Loos in Vienna's central cemetery --->
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