Adolf Loos: The Art of Architecture (Repost)
Adolf Loos: The Art of Architecture By Joseph Masheck
2013 | 320 Pages | ISBN: 1780764235 | EPUB + MOBI | 3 MB + 4 MB
2013 | 320 Pages | ISBN: 1780764235 | EPUB + MOBI | 3 MB + 4 MB
Regarded as one of the most significant prophets of modern architecture, Adolf Loos was a cultural star from early on. His work is emblematic of the turn-of-the-century generation split between the traditionalist culture of the nineteenth century and the innovative modernism of the twentieth. His essay Ornament and Crime equated superfluous ornament with tattooing in order to tell modern Europeans that they should know better. But the negation of ornament was supposed to reveal good style; and an indefatigable ironist has been taken too literally in denying architecture as a fine art. Without normalizing Loos s edgy radicality, Masheck argues that he affirmed authentic tradition as well as utility, even comfort, while attacking the Vienna Secession as a pseudo-modern font of indulgently decorative applied art. No simple anti-architect, Masheck's Loos is an unruly yet integrally canonical artist-architect. This is a brilliantly written revisionist reading of a perennially popular founding modernist.