great adolf loos early modernism examples

Adolf Loos Home by SAL

When Adolf Loos was designing homes and inventing new reasons why society needed Modernism (i.e. his book titled Ornament and Crime), most other designers were regurgitating traditional architectural forms, unlike these Loos examples.

Loos did not begin his career by completely deviating from tradition, but by exploring how he could start to manipulate traditional forms. In the example above, Loos traded out a barrel vault for a pitched roof thereby giving the space inside a greater sky-like expansive ambiance.

The traditional wood lattice-work below would typically have been embedded into the exterior stucco facade material. It is quite elegant how he turned what would have been typically a two-dimensional ornamental detail into a three-dimensional form.

Adolf Loos Home by SAL

Most modernist architects began their alternative architectural style by bending and stretching traditional architectural rules and forms. Have you seen Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris' (Le Corbusier's) first several homes, such as the Villa Fallet in 1906 and the Villa Stotzer in 1908? Or Mies van der Rohe's first several homes, such as the Riehl House in 1907 and the Urbig House in 1917?

As their imaginations and innovative spirits progressed, these modernist architects began to make a clean break away from traditional forms themselves. Lastly, as a new frontier emerged, they developed new styles and theories. Adolf Loos was one of those key players who developed a radical modernism architecture.

I find it fascinating to study the earliest works of these great architectural minds to find clues about how they had always been pushing the boundaries and exploring new ways of manipulating space, objects, materials, etc. Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe, among several others, saw every established building tradition as a challenge upon which one could improve.