Adolf Loos - Life

Life

Born in 1870 in Brünn (Brno) in the Moravia region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to an ethnically German family, Loos was nine when his father, a stonemason, died. He completed technical school in Liberec, which is now Technical University Liberec (commemorated by a plaque located in front of Pavilion H), and later studied at Dresden Technical University before moving to Vienna.

Loos stayed in America for three years, where he had an uncle living in Philadelphia. In his first year he visited the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and appreciated the work of Louis Sullivan. He visited St. Louis and did odd jobs in New York. Loos returned to Vienna in 1896 a man of taste and intellectual refinement, immediately entering the Viennese intelligentsia. His friends subsequently included Ludwig Wittgenstein, Arnold Schönberg, Peter Altenberg and Karl Kraus. He quickly established himself as the preferred architect of Vienna’s cultured bourgeoisie. Searching for marble in 1904 he first visited the island of Skyros and was confrontated with the cubic architecture of the Greek islands. When the empire collapsed and divided into independent states after World War I, he was awarded Czechoslovakian citizenship by President Masaryk.

Diagnosed with cancer in 1918, his stomach, appendix and part of his intestine were removed. His personal life was tumultuous. In July 1902, Loos married 21-year-old Carolina Catherina Obertimpfler (Lina), a drama student. The marriage ended in 1905. In 1919, Loos married 20-year-old Elsie Altmann, a dancer and operetta star and the Austrian-born daughter of Adolf Altmann and Jeannette Gruenblatt. They divorced seven years later. Loos married his third wife, writer and photographer Claire Beck, in 1929. She was the daughter of his clients Otto and Olga Beck, and thirty-five years his junior. They were divorced on April 30, 1932. Following their divorce, Claire Beck Loos wrote Adolf Loos Privat, a literary work of snapshot-like vignettes about Loos’ character, habits and sayings, which was published by the Johannes-Presse in Vienna in 1936. The book was intended to raise funds for Adolf Loos’ tomb.

By the time he was fifty he was nearly deaf and required people to speak to him through an ear horn. In 1928 he was disgraced by a paedophilia scandal and at his death in 1933 at 62 he was penniless. He died in Kalksburg near Vienna. Following his death in 1933, Loos’ body was moved to Vienna’s Zentralfriedhof to rest among the great artists and musicians of the city – including Arnold Schoenberg, Peter Altenberg, and Karl Kraus, all some of Loos’ closest friends and associates.

Read more about this topic:  Adolf Loos

Famous quotes containing the word life:

    Take a timber
    That you shall find lies in the cellar, charred
    Among the raspberries, and hew and shape it
    For a doorsill or other corner piece
    In a new cottage on the ancient spot.
    The life is not yet all gone out of it.
    And come and make your summer dwelling here....
    Robert Frost (1874–1963)

    For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible. Our science has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate meaning, forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, and noise of beast. Noise bought, sold, or prohibited. Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise.
    Jacques Attali (b. 1943)

    Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man’s life if he has the weight and cares about the words.
    Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)