The Solitaire by Adolf Loos announced the arrival of modern architecture

Prague - "Ornament is a crime," declared in his most famous statement one of the founders of modern architecture, the Brno native Adolf Loos. He considered decoration a manifestation of primitivism, while objectivity and practicality were signs of cultural maturity. He was a provocative creator and a brilliant theorist. This December 10 marks 140 years since his birth.
    Adolf Loos was a troublemaker from a young age. He inherited his 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 attended several high schools, including in Melk, Jihlava, and Liberec, eventually graduating from a technical school in Brno. To the great sorrow of his mother, with whom he did not get along at all, he refused to take over the family business and enrolled at a technical university in Dresden. He did not last long there either. He interrupted his studies first for a year of military service and then dropped out altogether. Instead, he went to America to gather experience. He struggled there for three years, washing dishes, working as a laborer, and eventually becoming a furniture designer and architect.
    He returned to Vienna, the emerging capital of contemporary European modernity, in 1896 with many impressions and considerable self-confidence. He joined the studio of Karl Mayreder and began publishing his radical opinions on culture, which led to a rift with the Vienna Secession group. Over time, 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 milestone in interior design, though some contemporaries condemned it at the time for its austerity and "bleakness," calling it Café Nihilismus.
    Loos's most famous building in the center of Vienna, a department store for the clothing company Goldman & Salatsch, completed in 1911 at Michaelerplatz close to the Hofburg, also earned poetic nicknames. Due to its smooth facade and window arrangement, the Viennese referred to it as a grain silo, a house without eyebrows, or even a manhole cover. Its construction caused a huge scandal, and the emperor reportedly ordered curtains to be drawn on the windows overlooking Loos's house so he wouldn't have to look at that monstrosity.
    After World War I, Loos designed housing for the socially disadvantaged in the city of Vienna, but when he was unable to fully assert his projects, he moved to Paris. Thanks to his publications, he enjoyed great respect there and lectured at the Sorbonne. However, of all the buildings he designed in the French metropolis between 1924 and 1928, he ultimately succeeded in fully realizing only one – a house for the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara.
    The private life of the great artist remains a real puzzle for Loos's biographers. How to reconcile the fact that he was, to put it mildly, problematic? Three marriages, a number of mistresses, and a clear penchant for brothels might still be forgiven by some. But a final verdict in a 1928 case for child abuse? Loos left the court with only a suspended sentence, and his influential friends declared him a victim of hostile justice; however, contemporary testimonies speak a different language. It was at least proven that he repeatedly compelled several girls aged eight to ten to pose naked in his studio and painted them in obscene poses. A search of his home then uncovered numerous photographs of child pornography.
    Adolf Loos remained an artistic outsider throughout his life. He only occasionally found clients who fully understood his plans. At the end of the 1920s, he rarely found common ground with František Müller, co-owner of the prominent Czech construction firm Kapsa & Müller, who commissioned him to design a villa in Prague's Střešovice. Its realization was accompanied by the usual difficulties (neighbors complained that it would overshadow the surrounding buildings and that it stylistically did not fit), but it was eventually completed in 1930. Today, the house, in which Loos brilliantly implemented his concept of the so-called Raumplan (a fluid connection of different levels of the house with rooms of varying heights connected by short staircases), serves as a museum and is considered one of the gems of Prague's modern architecture.
    Adolf Loos, who held Czechoslovak citizenship following the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, was honored in his 60s with honorary membership in the Austrian Association of Architects. However, just two years later, he suffered a stroke and became confined to a wheelchair. His congenital hearing impairment also worsened significantly, and he almost became deaf. Friends collected money for the impoverished builder, who had written history with his work, to stay in a sanatorium in Kalksburg, where he breathed his last on August 23, 1933. A commemorative speech at his grave was delivered by his loyal friend Karl Kraus.