Loos, Adolf / Giovanni Denti / Silvia Peirone - Adolf Loos. Opera completa - 1997

Rare.

Adolf Loos (Brünn, December 10, 1870 – Kalksburg, August 23, 1933) was an Austrian architect from the early 20th century.
Besides his designs, Loos is best known as an opponent of the Art Nouveau movement. He believed that architecture should be determined by reason. Superfluous ornaments had to be eliminated. In his 1908 lecture "Ornament and Crime" (Ornament und Verbrechen), he elaborated on the idea that cultural progress is linked to the reduction of ornamentation, and that it was a crime to allow craftsmen to waste their time on ornaments that only brought closer the moment when an object had become obsolete.

The most primitive societies therefore used many ornaments, Loos argued, while the most advanced know no superfluous ornaments, or at least attempt to suppress ornamentation if it serves no meaningful purpose. Works such as the Michaelerhaus in Vienna show, however, that Loos did not have a total aversion to ornamentation. He used, among other things, highly decorative materials such as marble. Loos's viewpoints are characteristic of modern functionalist architecture, the most famous slogan of which is "Form follows function".