Classical Tradition, Adolf Loos and Late 20Th Century Art

Classical Tradition, Adolf Loos and late 20th century art

Jan Bažant

The first scientifically-precise reconstruction of a Classical building from Greek antiquity - the Villa Kérylos - was built at a time when it looked as if classical morphology had breathed its last and the very era of speaking architecture was over[1]. By the beginning of the 20th century the first purely functional buildings were being created, their silent facades and totally undecorated interiors in stark contrast to the candidness with which the Villa Kérylos spoke of its builder. It demonstrated his social, political and academic ambitions and his attitude to the wave of anti-Semitism which was then dividing French society[2], as the villa’s architecture recalled the Delos of the second century BC, a cosmopolitan island peopled not only by Greeks and Romans but also by traders from Palestine and Egypt; it was also the site of the oldest synagogue outside Palestine. The builder and his architect each had his own personal and professional reasons for creating such a striking celebration of Classical Greece on the Côte d’Azur[3],which explains the outspokenness and authenticity of their return to Classical traditions, although there was nothing eccentrically escapist per se in that return. Even in the ostentatious anti-classicism of the 20th century architects will often stick closely to the Classical tradition, but rather like their predecessors in the second half of the nineteenth century they fail to realise that the connection with ancient Greece and Rome is the guarantee of future development. The first to draw attention to that paradox was Adolf Loos (1870-1933). His taste was formed in the 80s and early 90s of the last century when Ibel’s Budapest Opera House, Semper’s Vienna Burgtheater, Zítek’s Prague National Theatre and Rudolfinum and Wallot’s Berlin Reichstag were coming into being amid incessant lamentation about the absence of a contemporary style. Those buildings draw inspiration from ancient Roman architecture in a manner unprecedented in previous eras. While making direct reference to original monuments of ancient Rome and renaissance Italy they are inspired just as powerfully by buildings from the 18th and early 19th centuries while at the same time solving the problems of modern representative buildings[4].

Loos’ first villa, the Villa Karma[5], was built in the same period as the Villa Kerylos. The novelty of its design outraged the local inhabitants to such an extent that the architect received a summons from the police and the customer eventually cancelled the contract. What caused the greatest offence was the provocatively bare facade. The vision of a totally smooth wall was already in the air at the time and a whole number of architects were tending in that direction, but where Loos differed from them was in his determination not to make a revolutionary change. His experience of functional buildings that eschew all decoration, which he had acquired during a visit to the United States, emboldened him to return in his work to the traditions of Mediterranean architecture. It was in the Greek villages, where the Europe of his days sought out the relics of ancient Greece, that he found almost all the themes for his subsequent buildings - terracing that used local conditions, stairs that ended in landings, smooth white facades broken only by such doors and windows as were absolutely necessary, interiors with rooms extending over two floors and galleries in between[6]. As in Greek folk architecture, all one sees of the Villa Karma from outside is a windowless wall. The facade is consistently symmetrical, with corner pavilions as in ancient Roman villas. An explicitly Classical quotation is the entrance with its representation of Doric columns and a simple architrave. In the entrance hall there is an abrupt change of tone, but we still remain in the Classical tradition - the central ground-plan, the checkered marble floor and the gilded mosaic on the ceiling of the entrance hall all evoke imperial Roman architecture. Also in sharp contrast with the incommunicativeness of the main facade are other internal areas of the house and all the garden facades which are linked as far as possible with the surrounding nature, while on the north-west side there is the suggestion of a Classical peristyle with Doric columns. The supreme Classical quotation is to be found in the bathroom, where the client, a Viennese psychiatrist, wanted to evoke the mystery of the human body. Running up from a dark bath lined with black marble is a staircase bordered with Doric columns, reminiscent of the Propylon at the Acropolis in Athens. The aim, however, is not the daylight and a temple of virginal Athene, but a hermetically-closed bedroom ruled by Eros[7].

Loos’ classicism is no passing phase as in the case of Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe at the beginning of their careers, but a permanent feature of his work[8]. The coffered ceiling of his American Bar in Vienna of 1907 recalls the Classicist architecture of the traditional English club and by using mirrors to perform illusionist tricks he made the interior recall fantastic architecture in the style of 4th-century Pompeian paintings[9]. In 1910 Loos designed a department store for Alexandria with gigantic Ionian pilasters topped by a pyramid-shaped peristyle. He returned to the Classical architectural language even after his modernistic villas of 1910-1913. The salon of the Villa Strasser (1918-1919) is dominated by a marble Classical pillar that separates the music salon from the auditorium while also defining its symbolic function. In 1919, he and his student Paul Engelmann designed the Villa Konstandt for the city of Olomouc. The plans indicate a loggia with columns in front of the entrance on the garden side and alongside the front door a direct quotation from Classical Greek architecture in the form of a variation on the Erechtheum at the Parthenon in Athens. Further designs along those lines are the villas Bronner (1921), Stross (1922) a Simon (1924). Other projects that do not follow the modernist intellectual and architectural trend are the memorial for the Emperor Franz Josef of 1917, and to a certain extent the plans for the Modena-Gründe social centre in Vienna (1922) and the administrative building for the Boulevard des Italiens in Paris (1925)[10].

Loos’ plan for reintegrating the heritage of ancient Greece and Rome into modern life was the logical outcome of the revolutionary changes in the concept of architecture that occurred in Central Europe in the 1880s and 1890s[11]. Crucial to Loos’ development was the rehabilitation of baroque architecture and the return of fantasy to classical-style design. Otto Rieth, “the Nietzsche of architectonic graphics”, had published his celebrated “Skizzen” inspired by Piranesi in the mid-1890s[12]. No less significant was the opposite trend: the “Architectural Realism” of Albert Hofmann, Otto Wagner, Cornelius Gurlitt, August Thiersch, Heinrich von Ferstel, Josef Bayer, Hans Auer, Richard Streiter and others which introduced new materials and techniques into traditional architecture and vigorously strove for its moral renewal. Loos became a fervent supporter of that approach during his stay in the United States in the period 1893-1896 when he was thrilled by the perfect functionality of American “things”[13]. “The Greek vases are beautiful in the same way as a machine is beautiful, as a bicycle is beautiful”, he wrote in 1894[14]. What made Classical architecture such an intense challenge for Loos was his contact with a civilisation which not only asserted resolutely its Classical heritage but was also capable of producing “things” and buildings that were beautiful because of their perfect utility. As a result of his experience, however, Loos was one of the first Europeans to realise the negative implications of technical progress. Unlike his peers who tried to face up to the 20th century with social utopias, Loos accepted the all-embracing uncertainty, alienation and anonymity of city life as an unfortunate but inevitable phenomenon[15]. According to Loos the human dwelling should react to rapid changes by consistently eliminating them - its task is not to create a new man but to preserve what we have inherited from our forebears. Loos’ villas were intended to isolate their inhabitants from the 20th century, as their severe and unwelcoming exteriors indicated. Their interiors were intended to serve the same function, but the manner in which they confronted the outside world was quite different - they created a parallel, self-enclosed world in which monumentality and luxury alternate with cosiness. In Loos’ view the architect’s role is to demarcate appropriate space for human moods and feelings, which is why in his interiors some space is intended to excite and to stimulate the imagination while other space is supposed to encourage relaxation and ease the troubled senses[16]. The analogy with Classical rhetoric was not fortuitous. According to Loos, the architect must speak to people in an intelligible language and tell them things to which they are accustomed, but at the same times he must never use the same words over again - people must never have the impression of having heard exactly the same thing before[17].

Loos always attacked on two fronts, he criticised not only slavish imitation, as already mentioned, but also the attempts to create a completely new architectural language, the elitist Esperanto that the avant-garde artists had been trying to foist on the public since the beginning of the 20th century[18]. In the same way that is impossible to invent a language or change an entire vocabulary and syntax all in one go, it is also impossible to change all the rules of architecture overnight. For the language of architecture to remain intelligible it must go on developing and in each generation it must reflect anew on its own history. At the centre of Loos’ innovatory approach was the spatial plan, the “Raumplan”. “The great revolution in architecture is the solution of a plan in space”[19]. Whereas 18th and 19th century architecture used the ground-plan, material and decoration as it means of expression, Loos tried to achieve the same effect with space. Loos continued to concentrate on marble and mirrors as the way to express in his interiors what ornamentation had achieved in previous epochs. And as far as compositional types were concerned he returned again and again to the stepped pyramid, the cubic monolithic block and the corner cylinder.

Another major theme of Loos’ was the column, that dominates the facade of Loos’ Vienna house of 1909-1911[20]. That house on the Micheelerplatz was not simply a design, it was a manifesto and as such it caused outrage. The building plot allotted to Loos was directly opposite the most important historical monument in Vienna, the Hofburg, and Loos took up the challenge. He tried to draw inspiration from the architecture of Old Vienna while at the same time indicating that the city’s focal point had shifted for good from the royal court to the commercial/shopping centres. Loos’ house was intended as a bridge between the main Viennese palace and the most important shopping street in the Vienna of those days which still bore the name Kohlmarkt. In his design, tradition and the palace were represented by the building’s symmetrical classical composition and the monumental entrance conceived as a pronaos with four Tuscan columns. The 20th-century lifestyle and commerce were represented by the uniform facade inspired by American skyscrapers on which decoration was limited solely to the ground floor that was visible from street level. A further building-manifesto was to be Loos’ design for the Chicago Tribune skyscraper[21]. On 9th July 1922, the Chicago Tribune newspaper launched an architectural competition for the design of its new headquarters that was to be built on a prominent site in the centre of Chicago. The aim of the competition was worded most ambitiously: “to provide for the world’s greatest newspaper ... the world’s most beautiful office building”. The competition gained world-wide publicity thanks to the extremely generous prize offered for the successful entry. In the space of just a few months, hundreds of designs had already been received from 23 countries; the competition would seem to have been the most important of its kind ever and in response to public interest, an exhibition of the competition entries went on tour the following year[22]. The winning entry, the gothic skyscraper of Howels and Hood that was built in 1925, immediately became the city’s symbol, but the entry that aroused the most discussion - and still does - was Adolf Loos’. His 21-storey skyscraper was conceived as a gigantic Doric column of polished black granite standing on a plinth and on either side of the entrance were pillars reminiscent of Loos’ house on Vienna’s Machaelplatz.

When Loos was a young man, classically-inspired architecture was still a living tradition, never once broken until then. Ever since the fall of ancient Rome that tradition had been passed on from master craftsman to apprentice, from one generation to the next, simply being enlivened from time to time by study of preserved relics and Vitruvius’ guidelines. At the turn of the 20th century, however, the avant-garde, in the heat of its struggle with conservative taste, poured the baby out with the bath water, and after World War II there was a real danger that the classical architectural morphology, would become a dead language, like Latin or Greek. However, in the foreword to his design for the Chicago Tribune building Loos prophesied: “The great Greek Doric column must be built. If not in Chicago, then in some other town. If not for the ‘Chicago Tribune’ then for someone else. If not by me, then by some other architect”[23]. It is only in the last decades that his prophecy has been fulfilled, with architects turning back to Classical antiquity. 1980 saw the organisation of a touring exhibition entitled “Late entries to the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition” and some of those designs overtly pay homage to Loos’ concept of a skyscraper in the form of a Classical column[24]. In the same year a demonstration in tribute to Classicism took place at the Venice Biennale when twenty so far unknown architects exhibited a cardboard street of houses with Doric columns, arches and other Classical features. That “Strada Novissima” was part of a project aptly entitled “Presence of the Past”. For that matter the return of the Classical column to architecture had already been foreseen in 1975 by Bernhard Schneider and Alessandro Carlini of the TU Berlin in their manifesto “The Return of the Column”. They also pointed out quite rightly that the exorcism of the column did not simply infringe a certain norm it actually undermined the idea of artistic norms. It represented nothing new: it was not the beginning of a new stage in artistic development, but a collapse, as cultural continuity without norms is impossible. Therefore the artistic works that accompany the manifesto make no attempt to return to the pre-collapse situation but instead they describe the transformation of architecture’s function whereby it ceases to be a model of the world and becomes mere amusement[25].

In 1898 Loos wrote: “We are able to state that the great architect of the future will be a classicist - not a man who takes his lead from the work of his predecessors but one who goes back directly to classical antiquity”[26]. On the very threshold of modernism Loos understood what more and more architects are once more coming to realise, i.e. that classicism is not just the only modifiable, expandable and enduring compositional system it is also the only modifiable, expandable and enduring architectural form[27]. Loos’ prophecy can also apply to other genres, since in painting, sculpture and literature also, Classicism is proving to be the only art language with any future[28].

Loos quite properly stressed that architecture is above all a craft: “The house must please everyone, unlike the work of art which does not need to please anyone. The work of art is brought into the world without there being any need for it. The house on the other hand satisfies the need ... The work of art is revolutionary, the house is conservative ... So the house should have nothing to do with art, and architecture should not be numbered among the arts? Exactly so. Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. The rest, everything which serves an end, should be excluded from the realm of art”[29]. Thus in his critical detachment vis-a-vis the contemporary concept of art Loos took no more than the first step. It is not true that art must not please everyone or that it need not serve any purpose. Of course, every sculpture or picture must please everyone and serve a clearly defined function. By now it is clear that by declaring the autonomy of art, the avant-garde at the beginning of the 20th century played a key role in bringing about its decline and the consequent loss of its public. The assertion that a work of art is justified if it pleases just one person was the greatest mistake of the 20th century. It was a stupidity that led to intellectual shallowness and sloppy execution which purported to be authenticity. Buildings and events that we knew so well had to assume a comic and incomprehensible form in order to become a personal statement. Happily, however, the artists of the 1990s are abandoning the intrusive autobiographical tone and are starting to return to recognisable people, nature and real stories[30]. Likewise architects are again designing buildings for people, which, incidentally, explains the ever growing interest in Adolf Loos[31].