Aldo Rossi

Aldo Rossi (born 1931), one of the most influential architects during the period 1972-1988, has accomplished the unusual feat of achieving international recognition in three distinct areas: theory, drawing, and architecture. After receiving his architecture degree at the Polytechnic University in Milan in 1959, Aldo Rossi served as a course assistant to prominent architects Ludovico Quaroni and Carlo Aymonino. Aldo Rossi became a faculty member in the School of Architecture in Milan in 1965 and at the University in Venice in 1975. In addition to these regular appointments, his growing fame brought him positions as a professor in Zurich, Spain, and the United States.

Aldo Rossi ’s career as a theorist began to take shape during the years Aldo Rossi worked with Ernesto Rogers on the leading Italian architecture magazine Casabella-Continuita (1955-1964). In 1966 Aldo Rossi published the book The Architecture of the City, which subsequently was translated into several languages and enjoyed enormous international success. Spurning the then fashionable debates on style, Aldo Rossi instead criticized the lack of understanding of the city in current architectural practice. Aldo Rossi argued that a city must be studied and valued as something constructed over time; of particular interest are urban artifacts that withstand the passage of time. Despite the modern movement polemics against monuments, for example. Aldo Rossi held that the city remembers its past and uses that memory through monuments; that is, monuments give structure to the city.

This understanding of the city and its elemente, its monuments, and its permanences, informed Aldo Rossi ’s own designs for public buildings. One of his earliest major public buildings was the addition to the existing cemetery of the city of Modena in northern Italy. Perceiving the cemetery as a repository of social meaning, Aldo Rossi conceived of it as a house for the dead, indeed, a city of the dead. The elemental architectonic forms, as in the elegant stereometrie volumes of the ossuary with its chamfered windows, reflect his ongoing investigations into building typology, that which remains beyond the particular and the concrete.

The primary elements of architecture are repeated again and again in his work as Aldo Rossi engages in a determined search for essential forms based on what Aldo Rossi refers to as “repetition and fixation.” Aldo Rossi attempts to recover the “immovable elements of architecture,” not as empty catalogs of forms but as a search for an ageless originality found in formal types. Understood in this fashion, architecture, Aldo Rossi claims, helps make sense of the lived reality of the world. lt also provides the fixed scene of human events, which the architect historically has not been able to foresee. The most enduring architecture has been that which, in Aldo Rossi ’s words, “stopped short of the event.” Aldo Rossi gave these ideas built form in the school at Fagnano Olona, for example, where the grand stepped podium leads to the gymnasium; and provides a place where class photographs can be taken, a school ritual in both Italy and the United States. Such rituals, says Aldo Rossi, give the “comfort of continuity, repetition, compelling us to an oblique forgetfulness”; the architecture should provide the backdrop against which they can be played out.

In the project for the Carlo Felice Theater in Genoa, Aldo Rossi ’s task was to replace the theater that was bombed in World War II. His project leaves the old facade intact but accommodates full complex of new functions and spaces. The stereometric architectural forms convey an originality that at the same time transcends time and asserts a powerful presence in the urban fabric. Here and elsewhere Aldo Rossi avoids historical and technological detailing in favor of preserving the integrity of the volumes, which then convey the quality of structures that have stood since antiquity.

For Aldo Rossi, public buildings often become miniature versions of the city, particularly his schools and his Teatro del Mondo for the 1980 Venice Biennale. At Fagnano Olona, Aldo Rossi organized a series of elements (rotunda, cubic block, conical smokestack) around a central count and approached along linear elements such as a street, a bridge, or a wall axially aligned with the central elements, a disposition that recalls Italian city planning Such an organization also characterizes the school in Broni, where the library recalls historic models such as the anatomical theaters of Padua and Bologna. In turn, these types informed his Teatro del Mondo floating in the canals of Venice; like the city, the theater is also a stage, and simply miniaturizes the activity and organization of the city. In the same way, Aldo Rossi denies that Aldo Rossi creates the elements that regularly recur in his work; instead, Aldo Rossi discovers them in the city, especially the cities in Italy that Aldo Rossi knows and loves best; Milan, Mantua, and Venice.

Even before the success that Aldo Rossi has enjoyed in the last decade with projects underway from Japan to Germany, Aldo Rossi achieved singular distinction for his drawings. Although one of his professors tried to discourage him from studying architecture on the grounds that Aldo Rossi drew as if Aldo Rossi were a rural builder, Aldo Rossi was not disrouraged. Inspired by the urban landscapes of Italian painters Mario Sironi and Giorgio Morandi, Aldo Rossi produces haunting images in which his buildings and others in the city shrink, while everyday objects such as coffeepots and cigarette packs swell to fill the frame. The drawings conflate historical buildings, built and unbuilt projects by Aldo Rossi, mundane utensils, and shadowy figures occupying tiny cabins or yellow windows, and the same images, combined and reshuffled, reappear regularly, just as the cube and the cone reappear in his buildings.

The recurrence coffeepots in his increasingly wellknown drawings eventually induced the Italian firm Alessi to commission him to design a line of coffeepots and even, eventually, a watch that recalls those of his childhood schoolrooms.

Although Aldo Rossi ’s first projects, for a housing complex on the outskirts of Milan (Gallaratese 1969-1974), the San Cataldo cemetery in Modena (begun 1972), and Fagnano Olona School in Varese (1972-77), were contemporary with the publication of his most important theoretical works, only in the late 1970s and 1980s did his building work begin in earnest, and only in the last few years has his fame brought him a significant numberr of commissions in Italy.

Two civic center projects in Italy indicate the range of his responses to a similar program. In Perugia, a large civic center (1988). with town hall, theater, and housing project, is elevated on a parking podium and mediates between the historic city and the postwar business center. The U-shaped Town Hall, with shops below and offices above, is bisected by a galleria raised high on slender piers. Adjoining the town hall but irregularly placed on the parking podium are the theater, with its freestanding conical entrance tower, and a long, slender housing block. The disposition suggests an accretion of disparate buildings over time rather than a complex planned for uniformity. Although here as elsewhere drawing on simple local types, Aldo Rossi also transforms them, as Aldo Rossi does with the public arcade that slices through the town hall.

The town hall for the small village of Borgoricco demanded an altogether different response. Although Aldo Rossi adopted the U-shaped plan again, Aldo Rossi opens it up here with a south-facing courtyard framed on one end by copper clad, barrel-vaulted roofs that cascade down over the meeting room and the archives The simple elemental forms of the massive Perugia project give way here to a more complex massing and a greater play of materials, Each of the three principal views is articulated in markedly different ways, yet ordered and related by such elements us the narrow brick walls that rise through the full two stories.

Two other major recent private commercial projects in Italy are worth noting. For the GFT fashion group in Turin, Aldo Rossi designed an office building on an L-shaped site with an angled corner entrance of smooth brick. Aldo Rossi repeats a motif from Borgoricco when Aldo Rossi anchors the entrance with giant double columns surmounted by a green steel I-beam lintel. By incorporating a smaller version of the double column I-beam lintel motif in the auditorium. Aldo Rossi emphasizes the parallel between public, urban scale and the theater as a smaller version of the city. Street elevations of the two lateral wings incorporate stone porticoes, a traditional urban element in the Piedmontese city, but Aldo Rossi also modulates the surface by extending the stone revetment up to the first floor and framing the stone piers with green steel I-beams. A regional shopping center outside Parma rises up out of the flat plains with 50-ft-high brick towers that both carry the name of the center and provide a setting for billboards and advertising.

A hotel complex in Fukuoka, Japan, an architecture school for the University of Miami, Florida, and a victory in a major competition for the Museum of Natural History in Berlin promise further opportunities to render the ideas Aldo Rossi explored in Architecture of the City in built form.

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Major works:

Disney Development Company, Orlando-Celebration
Villa bei Ronchi Ronchi (Versilia), 1960
Contemporary History Museum, Milan, 1962
Rekonstruktion Theater Paganini und Gestaltung der Piazza della Pilotta, Parma, 1964
Platz vor dem Rathaus mit Denkmal, Segrate, 1965
Wohnanlage San Rocco, Monza, 1966
Middle school, Triest, 1968-69
F. de Amicis elementary school, Broni, 1969-70
Gallaratese 2 Residential Complex, Milan, 1969-73
San Cataldo Cemetery, Modena, 1971, 1978-84
Elementary School in Fagnano Olona, Fagnano Olona, 1972-76
Pavillon in Borgo Ticino, Borgo Ticino, 1973
Single-Family Houses in Broni, Broni, 1973, 1982-83
El Corral Del Conde, Seville, 1975
Single-Family Houses in Mozzo, Mozzo, 1977-79
Middle school, Broni, 1979-83
Teatro del Mondo, Venice, 1979-80
Single-Family Houses in Zandobbio, Zandobbio, 1979
Cooperativa d’abitazione, Goito, 1979-83
Cooperativa d’abitazione, Pegognaga, 1979-82
Wohn- und Gesch�ftsh�user S�dliche Friedrichsstadt Block 10, Berlin-Kreuzberg, 1981-88
Funerary Chapel, Giussano, 1981-87
Centro direzionale e commerciale Fontivegge, Perugia, 1982-88
New Town Hall, Borgoricco, 1983-90
San Cristoforo Station, Milan, 1983-92
Stadtvilla an der Rauchstra�e, Berlin-Tiergarten, 1983-85
Carlo Felice Theatre, Genoa, 1983, 1987-90
Aurora House, Turin, 1984-87
Centro Torri Department Store, Parma, 1985-88
Mehrzweck-Restaurierung, Este, 1985-93
Vialba residential complex, Milan, 1985-91
Mittelschule in Cantu, Cantu, 1986-93
Wohnanlage La Villette, Paris, 1986-91
School of Architecture, University of Miami, Miami, 1986-93
Gymnasium, Olginate, 1987-93
Hotel il Palazzo, Fukuoka, 1987-89
Lighthouse Theatre, Lake Ontario, 1987-89
Monumental Arch, Galveston, 1987-90
Hotel Duca di Milano, Milan, 1988-91
Palazzo dello Sport, Milan, 1988-94
The Hague Area Development, The Hague, 1988
Pisorno Area Development, Tirrenia, 1988-94
Center for Contemporary Art, Besse-et-Saint-Anastaise, 1988-91
Pocono Pines House, Mount Pocono, 1988-89
Centro Citta Commercial Area, Gifu, 1988-93
Via Croce Rossa Monument, Milan, 1988-90
GFT Comune di Settimo Torinese, Turin, 1988-93
Restaurant and Beer Hall, Sapporo, 1989-93
Ambiente Showroom, Tokyo, 1989-92
UNY Shopping Center, Nagoya, 1989-93
Asaba Design Studio, Tokyo, 1990-91
University of Castellanza, Castellanza, 1990-94
San Carlo alla Barona Church, Milan, 1990-93
Bonnefanten museum, Maastricht-C�ramique terrein, 1990-94
Civic Center, Verbania, 1990-93
Canary Wharf Office Complex, London, 1990-93
Hotel Ocean, Chikura, 1990-91
Residential Complex, Citt� di Castello, 1990-93
Lorenteggio Public Housing, Milan, 1990-93
Residential Complex, Bari, 1991-94
Palazzo del Cinema, Venice, 1991-94
Villa Alessi, Lago Maggiore, 1991-93
City Center, Kuala Lumpur, 1991-94
La Torre del Sole, Makuhari, 1991-94
Disney Office Complex in Disneyland, Orlando, 1991-94
Art Academy, New York City-Bronx, 1991-94
Linate Airport, Milan, 1991-94
Villa Alessi, Suna di Verbania, 1993-95
Quartier Sch�tzenstra�e, Berlin-Mitte, 1995-97
Celebration - Disney World town, Orlando, 1995
Cirque de Soleil-Haus, Berlin-Mitte, 1997-2000
Umnutzung des Pirelli-Firmengel�nde (Bicocca), Milan, 1999

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Albert Kahn

Albert Kahn (1869-1942) was born in Rhaunen, Germany, the oldest son of a rabbi. The Kahns and their six children emigrated to the United States in 1880. Albert Kahn received his professional training as an apprentice to an architect with the firm of Mason and Rice in Detroit. In 1891, Albert Kahn was awarded a scholarship for a year’s travel in Europe. During his travels Albert Kahn met the young architect Henry Bacon, and the two of them traveled together in Italy, France, Germany, and Belgium. In 1896, Albert Kahn married Ernestine Krolik and formed a partnership with George W. Nettleton and Alexander B. Trowbridge. Trowbridge left to become dean of the Cornell University School of Architecture in 1897, Nettleton died in 1900, and by 1902, Albert Kahn was in practice alone. Albert Kahn ’s practice is intenation-ally known for industrial work; his more traditional designs are less well known.

Because Albert Kahn practiced in Detroit, Albert Kahn ’s career closely followed the growth of the automotive industry. Albert Kahn was introduced to Henry B. Joy in 1902. Joy was instrumental in Albert Kahn ’s selection for projects at the University of Michigan, and when Joy became manager of the Packard Motor Car Co. in 1903, Albert Kahn was named architeet for tbe company. That same year, Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Co.

Albert Kahn ’s early industriai work was conservative in nature. Nine factories were designed between 1903 and 1905 for the Packard Motor Car Co. The first concreteframed building dated from 1905. This advanced structural system depended on the manufacture of appropriate reinforcing rods. Although Albert Kahn ’s brother was an engineer and manufacturer of reinforcing, the Albert Kahn bar did not succeed in the market. However, the experience with the concrete structure put Albert Kahn ’s office in the forefront of industrial design.

Many industrial commissions followed. Rather than relegating the design to junior staff, Albert Kahn carefully designed the factories, using such designers as his associate Ernest Wilby to assist him. Albert Kahn ’s factories were the first to use steel sash in conereteframed structures. Albert Kahn helped develop buildings for continuously moving assembly lines. His factories were known for the maximum use of natural lighting and ventilation, using continuous strip windows, roof monitors, or skylights. Albert Kahn pioneered the use o� longspan steel trusses, resuiting in large floor arens free of columns.

There were a number of fumous factories. Among the early ones was the Ford Motor Co. in Highland Park, Michigan (1909), which was under one roof. Among later buildings for Ford was u 1918 building with cantilevered balconies insde the factory, allowing easier handling of materials and parts Plants for the Burroughs Adding Machine Co. in Detroit (l919) and for the Fisher Body Co. in Cleveland, Ohio (1921), were other early works.

In 1917, Albert Kahn began the design of the Ford River Rouge Plant in Detroit. The first of the buildings (Building B) was 0.5 mi long, housing the entire assembly hne for automobiles. In 1936, Albert Kahn designed the Chrysler Corp. plant in Detroit using large trusses and glass curtain walls In 1938, Albert Kahn designed another Chrysler Corp. plant at Warren Michigan, for the HalfTon Truck Plant of the Dodge Divil sion. It featured longspan trusses and roof monitors as well as glass curtain walls. This series of buildings was elegant in design, using advanced construction technology.

Albert Kahn ’s office designed many other buildings in addition to the industrial work. These included several buildings for the University of Michigan, office buildings such as the General Motors Building in Detroit, and luxury residential projects, particularly for the homes of automotive executives.

Albert Kahn ’s World War II buildings included the Glen Martin bomber plant at Baltimore and the Willow Run Bomber plant for Ford, later used for automobile manufacture and assembly. Because of wartime blackout regulations. the latter building was windowless and electrically lit.

Albert Kahn worked continuously up to 1942. completing 57 years o� practice as an architeet. and the firm continues under the name of Albert Kahn Associates, Inc. A high point of Albert Kahn ’s fame was his influence on European work. In 1929, a Soviet commission touring Delroit asked him to design a tractor plant in Stalingrad This turned out so well that the firm built over 500 factories in the USSR in two years and trained many Soviet engineers and technicians to assist in the building program.

The comparison of Albert Kahn ’s work with Peter Behrens’s monumental work in Germany for the A.E.G. or Walter Gropius’s and Adolph Meyers’s 1911 Fagus Shoelast Factory at Alfeld an der Liene clarifies Ihe differences between European and American approaches. The European examples were more designed. with the use of brick, neoclassic forms, and delight in the technology that allowed such details as wrapping glass around corners. The spirit of that work differs from Knhn. who evolved industrial buildings without prototypes or use of traditional design concepts. The industrial building was of contiunued aesthetic interest as reflected in Gropius’s design of the Bauhaus at Dessau. Germany. in 1926 The best of Albert Kahn ’s work implies a different aesthetic based on simple construction. standard materials, and ease of construction. In this sense it was more like the manufactured product than a symbolic interpretation.

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Major works:

Hiram Walker offices, in Windsor, Ontario, 1892
Temple Beth El, now the Bonstelle Theater of Wayne State University, 1903
The Palms Apartments, on Jefferson Avenue, Detroit, 1903
Belle Isle Aquarium and Conservatory, on Belle Isle, Detroit, 1904
Casino, on Belle Isle, Detroit, 1907
George N. Pierce Plant, in Buffalo, New York, 1906
Willistead Manor, home of the son of Hiram Walker, 1906
Battle Creek Post Office, 1907
Packard Plant, 1907
Cranbrook House, at Cranbrook Educational Community, 1907
Highland Park Ford Plant, Highland Park, Michigan, 1908
Mahoning National Bank, Youngstown, Ohio, 1909
Detroit News building, 1917
General Motors Building, now State of Michigan offices, 1919
Detroit Police Headquarters, 1923
Temple Beth El, 1923
Walker Power Plant, in Windsor, 1923
Detroit Free Press building, 1925
Edsel & Eleanor Ford House, Michigan, 1927
Fisher Building
River Rouge Glass Plant, 1930
Dearborn Inn, 1931
Ford Rotunda, 1934
Dodge Truck Plant, Warren, Michigan, 1938
Detroit Arsenal Tank Plant, 1941
Willow Run Bomber Plant, 1941
Ford Richmond Plant, California
Buildings at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1904
Hill Auditorium, 1913
Natural Science Building, 1913
Hatcher Graduate Library, 1920
Clements Library, 1923
Angell Hall, 1924
Couzens Hall, 1925
University Hospital (now destroyed), 1925
Simpson Institute for Medical Research, 1927
Burton Tower, 1936

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Bibliography:

1. C, Hilebrand. The Architecture of Albert Kahn, M.I.T. Press. Cambridge. Mass., 1974.
2. “The Legacy of Albert Kahn,” exhibition catalog, The Detroit Institute of Arrs. Detroit. Mich., 1970.

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Adolf Loos

Adolf Loos (1870-1933) ranks as one of the most important pioneers of the modern movement in architecture. Ironically, his influence was based largely on a few interior designs and a body of controversial essays. Adolf Loos ’s buildings were rigorous examples of austere beauty, ranging from conventional country cottages to planar compositions for storefronts and residences. His built compositions were little known outside his native Austria during his early years of practice.

Adolf Loos was born in Brno (Bruenn), Moravia, now Czech republic, on December 10, 1870. Adolf Loos was introduced to the craft of building at an early age while working in his father’s stone masonry shop. At the age of seventeen. Adolf Loos attended the Royal and Imperial State College at Reichenberg in Bohemia. In 1889 Adolf Loos was drafted for one year of service in the Austrian army. From 1890 to 1893, Adolf Loos studied architecture at the Technical College in Dres den. As a student, Adolf Loos was particularly interested in the works of the classicist Schinkel and, above all, the works of Vitruvius. Adolf Loos ’s developing tastes were considerably broadened during a three-year stay in the United States, which began in 1893. The 23-year-old architect was particularly impressed by what Adolf Loos regarded as the innovative efficiency of U.S. industrial buildings, clothing, and household furnishings. In 1896, Adolf Loos returned to Vienna where Adolf Loos began working in the building firm of Carl Mayreder.

In 1897, in the pages of The Neue Freie Presse of Vienna, Adolf Loos initiated a series of polemic articles that later established his international reputation. Adolf Loos did not directly address architecture in his writings. Instead, Adolf Loos examined a wide range of social ills, which Adolf Loos identified as the motivating factors behind the struggle for a transformation of everyday life. Adolf Loos ’s writings focused increasingly on what Adolf Loos regarded as the excess of decoration in both traditional Viennese design and in the more recent products of the Vienna Secession and the Wiener Werkstatte. In 1898, in the pages of the review Ver Sacrum, which was an organ of the Wiener Secession, Adolf Loos published an essay that marked the beginning of a long theoretical opposition to the then popular art noveau movement. His theories culminated in a short essay entitled, “Ornament And Crime,” published in 1908. To Adolf Loos, the lack of ornament in architecture was a sign of spiritual strength. Adolf Loos referred to the opposite, excessive ornamentation, as criminal - not for abstract moral reasons, but because of the economics of labor and wasted materials in modern industrial civilization. Adolf Loos argued that because ornament was no longer an important manifestation of culture, the worker dedicated to its production could not be paid a fair price for his labor. The essay rapidly became a theoretical manifesto and a key document in modernist literature and was widely circulated abroad. Le Corbusier later attributed “an Homeric cleansing” of architecture to the work.

Another point of contention decried by Adolf Loos was the masking of the true nature and beauty of materials by useless and indecent ornament. In his 1898 essay entitled “Principles of Building,” Adolf Loos wrote that the true vocabulary of architecture lies in the materials themselves, and that a building should remain “dumb” on the outside. In his own work, Adolf Loos contrasted austere facades with lavish interiors. Much like Mies van der Rohe, Adolf Loos arrived at the reduction of architecture to a purely technical tautology that emphasized the simple assemblage of materials. This article was followed by the 1910 essay entitled “Architecture,” in which Adolf Loos explained important contradictions in design: between the interior and the exterior, the monument and the house, and art works and objects of function. To Adolf Loos, the house did not belong to art because the house must please everyone, unlike a work of art, which does not need to please anyone. The only exception, that is, the only constructions that belong both to art and architecture, were the monument and the tombstone. Adolf Loos felt that the rest of architecture, which by necessity must serve a specific end, must be excluded from the realm of art.

In 1899, Adolf Loos designed the Cafe Museum, which proved to be one of the most notable projects of his early work. The austere interior was a mature architectural embodiment of his theorized renunciation of stylish ornamentation. The starkness of the “untattooed” facade that inspired the popular name Cafe Nihilismus asserted Adolf Loos ’s developing theory of the predominance of technique over decoration. The cafe also affirms his aesthetic equation of beauty and utility by bringing every object back to its purely utilitarian value. To Adolf Loos, that which is beautiful must also be useful. Thus, the only elements Adolf Loos used to pattern the vaulted ceiling of the cafe interior were strips of brass, which also served as electrical conductors. A more refined work, the tiny Karntner Bar Vienna (1907), reveals in microcosm the architect’s great sensitivity to spatial manipulation. Once again, Adolf Loos showed his fondness for the expressive use of natural materials as Adolf Loos skillfully manipulated classical materials including marble, onyx, wood, and mirror, into a careful composition of visual patterns.

Between 1909 and 1911, Adolf Loos designed and constructed one of his best known works, the controversial Looshaus in the Michaelerplatz, in the heart of old Vienna. This complex design enunciated theorems on the relationship between the memory of the historic past of a great city and the invention of the new city based on the modern work of architecture. The design was characterized by a mute facade from which all ornamental plastic shapes were absent. For Adolf Loos, the language of the environment of the metropolis was centered in the absence of all ornament. In 1910, a public furor spawned by the simplicity of the modernistic design resulted in a municipal order to suspend work; construction ceased and building permits were denied. Adolf Loos responded to the attacks in a public meeting attended by more than 2000 angry residents. The controversy ended with an agreement to add window boxes in an attempt to countrify and familiarize the unpopular design.

Adolf Loos ’s private residential works were characterized by unembellished white facades. As a result, these buildings have routinely been associated with the work of Le Corbusier, J. J. Oud, and others. Among the more famous were the much published Steiner House (1910) and Scheu House (1912), both in Vienna. One of Adolf Loos ’s best known projects was the entry for the Chicago Tribune Tower competition of 1922. Adolf Loos ’s surprising combination of Doric columns at ground level with modern skyscraper technology indicated that Adolf Loos was less doctrinaire about ornament than his modernist colleagues believed. To Adolf Loos, the polished black granite columns, durable classical symbols in a building, were altogether useful and therefore beautiful.

Also in 1922, Adolf Loos was appointed to the post of Chief Architect of the Housing Department of the Commune of Vienna. His projects during this time were primarily con structions modulated around simply-composed layouts utilizing basic construction technology. Flexible interior arrangements were achieved through the use of movable partitions. Exteriors were typical of suburban housing Vegetable gardens, which were considered essential extensions of the dwellings, were assigned high priorities. Adolf Loos soon grew disillusioned with his work as chief architect. As a result of his opposition to the then current ideology of Austrian Marxism, Adolf Loos resigned from his post the same year Adolf Loos was appointed.

Adolf Loos moved to France in 1922. Adolf Loos lived there until 1927, dividing his time between Paris and the Rivier with frequent journeys to Austria, Germany and Czechoslovakia. Adolf Loos was received enthusiastically by the French avantgarde. His work entitled “Ornament and Crime” was translated in 1920 in Esprit Nouveau, a publication edited by Le Corbusier, Paul Dermee, and Ozenfant. Adolf Loos also exhibited regularly at d’Automne, and became the first foreigner to be elected to its jury. Adolf Loos built some of his most significant works during this period. These included The Tzara House in Paris (1926-1927), Villa Moller in Vienna (1928), Villa Muller (1930), Villa Winternitz in Prague (1931-1932) and the Khuner Country House at Payerbach in lower Austria. Monolithic in nature, these works contrasted greatly with the glass architecture that dominated rationalist styles of the 1920s. Once again, Adolf Loos as in a posture of contentious indifference to fluctuations in current taste.

In 1930, on his sixtieth birthday, Adolf Loos was officially recognized as a master of architecture. Adolf Loos was bestowed with an annual honorific income by the president of the Czechoslovakian Republic. His collected essays were published the following year. Adolf Loos died on August 23, 1933 and was buried beneath a simple tombstone of his own design. His most significant contribution to architecture remains his literary discourse.

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Major works:

Caf� Museum, at Vienna, Austria, 1898 to 1899.
Wohnung Leopold Langer, at Vienna, Austria, 1901.
Villa Karma, Clarens, at Montreux, Switzerland, 1904 to 1906.
Wohnung Rudolf Kraus, at Vienna, Austria, 1907.
Schmuckfedern-gesch�ft Sigmund Steiner, at Vienna, Austria, 1907.
American Bar, at Vienna, Austria, 1907.
Wohnung Bellak, at Vienna, Austria, 1907.
Schneidersalon Knize, Vienna, Austria, 1909 - 1913.
House on the Michaelerplatz, at Vienna, Austria, 1910 to 1911.
Steiner House, at Vienna, Austria, 1910.
Scheu House, Vienna, at Austria, 1912 to 1913.
Horner House, at Vienna, Austria, 1921.
Rufer House, at Vienna, Austria, 1922.
Villa Stross, at Vienna, Austria, 1922.
Landhaus Spanner, at Gumpoldskirchen, Austria, 1923.
Big shop (project), at Alexandria, Egypt, 1924.
Tristan Tzara House, at Paris, France, 1926 to 1927.
Moller House, Vienna, at Austria, 1927 to 1928.
Wohnung Hans Brummel, at Vienna, Austria, 1929.
Wohnung Willy Hirsch, at Pilsen, Czech Republic, 1929.
Khuner Villa, at on the Kreuzberg, Payerback, Austria, 1930.
Villa M�ller, Prague, Czech Republic, 1930.
Wohnung Leo Brummel, at Vienna, Austria, 1930.
M�ller House, at Prague, Czech Republic, 1930.
Landhaus Khuner, Payerbach, Austria, 1930.
Bojko House, at Vienna, Austria, 1929 to 1930.
Mitzi House, at Vienna, Austria, 1931.
House in the Vienna Werbund, Austria, 1930 to 1932.
Semler House, at Pilsen, Czech Republic, 1932.

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Bibliography:
1. Adolf Loos, Spoken into the void: collected essays, 1897-1900, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1982.
2. B. Gravagnuolo, Adolf Loos, Rizzoli, New York, 1982. L. Miin2, Adolf Loos, Praeger, New York, 1966.

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