Welcome to the Loos House. Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome

Words and Photographs by Luca Trevisani

The epidermis. The skin. Touch.  

The edifying art of Adolf Loos seems to be all about surfaces. You immediately get the urge to catalogue it all, make a list of materials, shapes and textures, a detailed list of the quantities, proportions and associations, as befits the reactants in a chemical reaction, by definition specific and unsubstitutable.   

And so the cold Cipollino marble we encounter at number 10 Bendova Street, in the room designed for Vilem and Gertruda Kraus, opposite to the soft velvets of the chaises longues always to be found in every house, or the opulence of the red mahogany that lines whole rooms (please go to Husova 58, in Plzeň) and the luxury horsehair sofa cover in Villa Müller (Nad hradním vodojemem 642/14, 162 00 Prague), and then the surfaces covered with green glass or Dutch pottery, or veneered with glossy lemon, maple and oak wood, or covered by rigid rice matting. And then the lights: brass pendants wrapped in cotton braids, meshes of glass or crystal drops, or soft, semi-cylindrical drapes held back against the wall by stiff, steel leashes. And then the colours of the radiators, left visible, painted carmine red or lapis lazuli blue, and the kitsch and glaring yellow of the furniture in the Brummel house; it’s funny to think that in 1929, the same year that Piet Mondrian was making his first succinct abstract, airy, musical compositions, Loos used the exact same colours to build his colour theory, which was instead so static, haughty, muscular. 

Finally, the pondered use of the mirror as a sublime stratagem to fashion spatial depths whose existence would otherwise be prohibited by walls and corners and physical limits: the reflected image is used to multiply recesses and edges and niches, generating the most solid of intangible volumes; visual tricks, mise en abyme, allusive perceptual ambiguities, which bring to mind more Lewis Carroll than rationalist functionalism. And more, an army of overwhelmingly carmine-coloured oriental rugs, red like those placed on the emerald-green carpets in the Kraus house in Pilsen, making it into a sort of hypnotic mosque, icy cool but soft, welcoming in its own way, plush despite its severity. The rug as a symbol, metaphor, archetype of dreamy intimacy, of a body bending over onto another body, as Cristina Campo wrote. East and west, sumptuousness and restraint, spices and silk, moral ascetism and an unexpected Balkan exuberance, in a word, the Habsburg Empire, misty and sensual and rigid and inhibited, in a word, the place shared by Arthur Schnitzler and Karl Kraus.

Knocking on Schnitzler’s door

Arthur Schnitzler, yes him, the writer who inspired Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrik’s renowned final film, decadent investigation of a loving relationship and its immense compositional weaknesses, made of details and symbols and enigmas, all elements – as we will see – which belong wholly to Loos’ domestic universe. But, carrying on, Arthur Schnitzler is also the writer of La Ronde, the scandalous sequence of pictures and scenes entangling the sexual longings of ten different characters, each one representing a different social extraction from the former Viennese empire, in which the coitus takes place off-stage, far from view, like a shady, magnetic and invisible ritual. To be quite frank, Loos’ houses, once seen and experienced “in the flesh”, ooze the same libertine longing examined by Schnitzler. Minus the modernist rhetoric, these walls contain the plastic representation of the metaphysics of desire. 

Earlier I was talking about materials as reactants, well, maybe I should explain myself better: here the material is a trigger to detonate instincts, an excuse to unleash a hushed libidinous life. Also the Raumplan, the legendary volumetric and spatial mechanism upon which Loos’ famous free plans grow, that principle of tidiness that places rooms and spaces on the stairwell as if they were leaves on a tree trunk… well, in reality it’s just an invitation to take a peek, a theatre of transgressive intimacy. By freeing the house from the walls, we can pierce inside the rooms and glimpse intimate views, while bouncing from one floor to another: from the drawing room to the boudoir, from the boudoir to the dining room, from here to the study of the rich, male houseowner, and from there to the floors above and below.  

The house as a libidinal merry-go-round that regulates instincts in rigid formal protocols, through schematic spatial limitations and precise visual directives. A mental and carnal upper-class panopticon, the desiring eye, to use Bataille’s words, consisting of sadomasochistic tendencies and role plays of master and servant, seducer and seduced, which not even the best films of Lars von Trier can match. Architecture as a mental affair, a highly refined and pitiless regulatory machine, obsessive construction that has to keep passion at bay, titillating it in a cage which both prompts pleasure and boxes it in, constrains it. Because, it’s a well-known fact, desire flourishes when it is curtailed, expands when its will is chastised, its ambitions dilate when limits and bans are laid down. In this sense, symmetry, a planning theme that recurs in all these houses, is to be understood as a device of out-and-out coercion, a gesture limiting the gaze and its mobility, a strict protocol that exploits the modularity of geometry to induce moral rigour and physical obedience. The specularity of the spaces is obsessive to the point of becoming oppressive, but also strangely pleasant, like a restriction imposed on the flesh. Perspective is a symbolic form revealed to be at the service of a psychological design and exercising a physical, solid, muscular pressure. 

Dividi et impera

Loos’ architecture is an architecture of pleasure, regulating the mechanics of bodies, enjoyment and ecstasy in a subtly perverse game of physical and intellectual seduction. Upon closer inspection, it’s a truly subliminal choreography, a narrative device that is as impalpable as it is cruel, ferocious precisely because it is imperceptibly manipulative. A design made of subtle, apparently banal and thus delicately coercive gestures, like the choice to furnish the living rooms with chairs that are all different from one another. Low, unstable stools; oversize, horizontal deckchairs; stiff wicker chairs and heavy wooden thrones; schematic armchairs and gracile seats of Eastern inspiration; a single chair individuating every different guest. And so each guest is forced to become a character in a character play. An obliged posture for each person present, group solitude, a specific and unique role in the play of parts that we call society.   

Yin and Yang

Freedom and constraint. Empty and full. Male and female. The dialectic between opposing forces, here is another important element in this domestic grammar. It almost seems as if the energy generated by the limited movement were used to achieve a higher state, a vital force, through a sort of tantric yoga of interior design. I’m thinking of the Japanese prints collected by the Vogls, in Pilsen, fixed forever on the walls by wooden panelling that is sadistically extreme, imprisoning, mute, peremptory, also because of the lack of decorations. It’s as if the frame protecting the images had been put under a spell, making it grow disproportionately, hypertrophically, until it realized it was a wall. A display understood as a mineral gesture, a petrified geometry, the solid representation of an occult liturgy, which imprisons the fluid elements, the fluctuating Japanese images, in a cage that is more semantic than it is physical.  

The clash between rigid and flaccid, liquid and solid perhaps finds its apex in the two aquariums (as if to underline the very much dual nature of this puzzle) embedded in the marble of the main hall in Villa Müller, in Prague. More than a house, this villa is a delight for the spirit, the complete and extreme manifesto of Loos’ thought.  

The masterpiece of his older years, this house is the end of an apprenticeship whose stages we have traced, from Prague to Pilsen. Here, in the Müller’s home, Loos’ toolkit is unfolded in all its unflinching rigour. All of its parts and the stage devices of which we had only so far seen hints or fragments, here come together in a complete system, in a maniacal, plastic symphony. I was saying about the pair of aquariums, well, they are an explicit, voyeuristic declaration, a direct reference to the swimming pool designed, again by Loos, for the Parisian home of Joséphine Baker. Occupying two floors of the building, the pool had windows from which to spy on the swimmers, in an erotic mix of glacial, celibate, evidently male and predatory gazes, objectivizing and impersonal enclosures of the psyche.  

Freedom and constraint. Empty and full. Male and female. The dialectic between opposing forces, here is another important element in this domestic grammar. It almost seems as if the energy generated by the limited movement were used to achieve a higher state, a vital force, through a sort of tantric yoga of interior design. I’m thinking of the Japanese prints collected by the Vogls, in Pilsen, fixed forever on the walls by wooden panelling that is sadistically extreme, imprisoning, mute, peremptory, also because of the lack of decorations. It’s as if the frame protecting the images had been put under a spell, making it grow disproportionately, hypertrophically, until it realized it was a wall. A display understood as a mineral gesture, a petrified geometry, the solid representation of an occult liturgy, which imprisons the fluid elements, the fluctuating Japanese images, in a cage that is more semantic than it is physical.  

The clash between rigid and flaccid, liquid and solid perhaps finds its apex in the two aquariums (as if to underline the very much dual nature of this puzzle) embedded in the marble of the main hall in Villa Müller, in Prague. More than a house, this villa is a delight for the spirit, the complete and extreme manifesto of Loos’ thought.  

The masterpiece of his older years, this house is the end of an apprenticeship whose stages we have traced, from Prague to Pilsen. Here, in the Müller’s home, Loos’ toolkit is unfolded in all its unflinching rigour. All of its parts and the stage devices of which we had only so far seen hints or fragments, here come together in a complete system, in a maniacal, plastic symphony. I was saying about the pair of aquariums, well, they are an explicit, voyeuristic declaration, a direct reference to the swimming pool designed, again by Loos, for the Parisian home of Joséphine Baker. Occupying two floors of the building, the pool had windows from which to spy on the swimmers, in an erotic mix of glacial, celibate, evidently male and predatory gazes, objectivizing and impersonal enclosures of the psyche.

Welcome to the Loos house, welcome to the Pleasure Dome.

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