Brno native Adolf Loos announced the arrival of modern architecture

Prague – "Ornament is a crime," declared one of the founders of modern architecture, Adolf Loos, born in Brno, in his most famous statement. He regarded ornamentation as a manifestation of primitivism, while objectivity and functionality were signs of cultural maturity. He was a provocative creator and a brilliant theorist. On Wednesday, December 10, it will be 150 years since his birth.

Loos is now globally recognized, with his works preserved mainly in Vienna, as well as in Plzeň and Prague, and also in Paris, Montreux, and elsewhere in Europe. Among the most famous projects of this architect, who is considered a leading figure of architectural purism in the Czech Republic, are the Müller Villa in Prague and the Villa of Viktor Bauer in Hrušovany near Brno. More than 30 buildings and interiors in the Czech Republic bear his authorship.

From a young age, Adolf Loos was a troublemaker. He inherited talent from his father, a stonemason and sculptor from Brno. However, his father died early, and the boy grew up only with his mother and younger sisters. Due to disciplinary problems, he changed several secondary schools, including those in Melk, Jihlava, and Liberec, eventually graduating from a technical school in Brno. To the great sorrow of his mother, with whom he had a poor relationship, he refused to take over the family business and enrolled in a technical school in Dresden. Yet he did not last long there either. He first interrupted his studies for a year of service in the army, and then dropped out entirely. Instead, he went to America to gain experience. He struggled there for three years, washing dishes, working as a laborer, and eventually as a furniture designer and architect.

He returned to Vienna, the emerging metropolis of contemporary European modernity, in 1896, full of impressions and appropriate self-confidence. He joined the studio of Karl Mayreder and began publishing his radical views on culture, which led to a rift with the Vienna Secession. Over time, however, he befriended well-known journalist and critic of Austrian society Karl Kraus, writer Peter Altenberg, and painter Oskar Kokoschka. In 1897, he created his first significant work – Café Museum at the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Operngasse. Today, it is valued as a turning point in interior design; at the time, some contemporaries condemned it for its austerity and "bleakness," calling it Café Nihilism.

Loos's most famous building in the center of Vienna, the department store of the clothing company Goldman & Salatsch, completed in 1911 at Michaelerplatz, received poetic nicknames. Due to its smooth façade and the arrangement of its windows, locals referred to it as a grain silo, a house without eyebrows, or simply a canal cover. Its construction caused a huge scandal, and the emperor himself reportedly ordered curtains to be drawn in the windows with views of Loos's building so that he wouldn't have to look at the atrocity.

After World War I, Loos designed housing for the socially disadvantaged in Vienna, but when he could not fully assert his projects, he moved to Paris. Thanks to his publications, he was highly respected there and lectured at the Sorbonne. However, of all the buildings he designed in the French capital between 1924 and 1928, he only managed to fully realize one – a house for dadaist poet Tristan Tzara.

His private life was not without problems. He was married three times, had numerous mistresses, and a penchant for brothels. In 1928, he was sentenced to probation for child abuse. His influential friends then declared him a victim of hostile justice, but contemporary testimonies tell a different story. It was established that he repeatedly coerced several girls aged eight to ten to pose nude for him in his studio, painting them in obscene poses. During a search of his house, a quantity of photos depicting child pornography was discovered.

Adolf Loos remained an artistic outsider throughout his life. He managed to find a client who fully understood his plans only a few times. At the end of the 1920s, he coincidentally agreed with František Müller, co-owner of the significant Czech construction company Kapsa & Müller, who commissioned him to design a villa in the Prague district of Střešovice. Although its realization faced the usual problems (neighbors complained that it would overshadow the surrounding buildings and that it did not fit stylistically), it was ultimately ceremoniously completed in 1930. Today, the house, where Loos brilliantly implemented his concept of the so-called Raumplan (a fluid connection of various levels of the house with rooms of different heights connected by short staircases), serves as a museum and is among the gems of Prague's modern architecture.

Adolf Loos, who had Czechoslovak citizenship since the dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy, was awarded honorary membership in the Austrian Society of Architects at the age of 60. Just two years later, he suffered a stroke and became confined to a wheelchair. His congenital hearing impairment also significantly worsened, and he became almost deaf. Friends gathered funds for the impoverished builder, who wrote history with his work, for a stay in a sanatorium in Kalksburg, where he took his last breath on August 23, 1933, at the age of 62. A solemn speech was delivered at his grave by his loyal friend Karl Kraus.

Since August of this year, Loos has a new memorial in his native Brno, which takes the form of a simple block. The memorial is essentially a sculptural concrete form laid out, a negative or imprint of a tombstone.