ADOLF LOOS – WORLD CITIZEN

ADOLF LOOS – WORLD CITIZEN 

An accompanying publication to the exhibition held to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of the world-famed pioneer of modern architecture, Adolf Loos.

ADOLF LOOS – WORLD CITIZEN is an accompanying publication to the exhibition of the same name, prepared to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the birth of the world-famed pioneer of modern architecture Adolf Loos (10. 12. 1870 – 23. 8. 1933) by the City of Prague Museum in cooperation with the National Technical Museum. The exhibition was open from 10 December 2020 to 3 October 2021.

ADOLF LOOS – WORLD CITIZEN presents the most significant ideas in Loos’s teaching on architecture and living styles, which were and are vital for his lifetime oeuvre. Using as examples colour photographs of Loos’s interiors, primarily from the Villa Müller in Prague and interior realisations in Plzeň, it presented Loos’s unique key principles: the relation between exterior and interior, symmetry, organisation of space using the enfilade, and the Raumplan. Additionally, we hoped to use the photography series to recall the research into the work of Loos in the Czech lands, a project that the City of Prague Museum started as far back as 2003. Thanks to these investigations and the activities of the Adolf Loos Study and Documentation Centre, it was possible to bring Loos’s achievements back into wider awareness. Among other consequences, it led to the successful restoration of several Plzeň interiors and, in the past year, the rescue of one of Loos’s first built realisations in Moravia – the villa for Viktor Bauer in Hrušovany near Brno.

Additionally, the publication presents a completely new and unique collection of architectural models of realised and unrealised designs by Adolf Loos in the Czech lands, along with the exhibition’s most notable feature, the model of his unbuilt plan for the Chicago Tribune building, installed as a symbol of his linking of modern and classical architecture.