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March 15, 2013 11:23 pm

By Edwin Heathcote

Surprising parallels can be found in the contrasting styles of Adolf Loos andJosef Hoffmann

The dining room at Palais Stoclet, with frieze by Gustav Klimt

n his 1900 The Story of the Poor Little Rich Man, Viennese architect Adolf Loos (1870-1933)wrote a cautionary fable about a wealthy man who commissioned a house from an architect. This

house contained everything he could ever possibly need: every object, every surface, every detail hadbeen designed to perfection to harmonise and to create a perfectly aesthetically and stylistically co-ordinated lifestyle. The client is delighted with his house. But then he receives a gift from a friend.

‘A chess game in space’

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Palais Stoclet in Brussels

One of Hoffman's drafts for the kitchen at Palais Stoclet

When the architect returns, he is horrified to see this trinket not intended in the original design andorders his client to get rid of it. Disillusion sets in and the wealthy client realises his life has beenfrozen; he can receive no more gifts, buy no more art, make no more changes. He is even chided forhis slippers. “Have you forgotten already?” he asked teasingly. “You designed them yourself!”

“I certainly did,” thundered the architect. “For the bedroom! Those two impossible splotches ofcolour ruin the whole ensemble. Can’t you see that?”

The speculation is that Loos was writing about hisViennese contemporary, Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956 –the two architects were born five days apart) whosehouses were all conceived as Gesamtkunstwerk – totalworks of art. Nowhere is this obsessive decorativeholisticism more apparent than in Hoffmann’simposingly gated Palais Stoclet in Brussels.Commissioned in 1905 and completed in 1911, thehouse was the zenith of the Vienna Secession, the arts-and-crafts-influenced Austrian equivalent of artnouveau, in which every detail was pored over, richlyveneered or marbled, gilded, bronzed or decorated. The

sparkling, swirling golden mosaic friezes in the dining room are by Gustav Klimt; there are furnitureand fittings by Koloman Moser and Michael Powolny but virtually everything else is by Hoffmann,from the light fittings to the cutlery. If it wasn’t for its scale and its position in Brussels’ well-heeledcentre, the house would look austere from the outside. It may be clad in marble, piped with bronze(which was once gilded) and crowned by a floral-capped tower guarded by a quartet of proto-fascistnaked stone bouncers but, in the terms of the era, this is modest – no classical columns, no porticos,angels, carved friezes and so on. Instead, just plain white walls and a delicate but simpleconservatory structure perched on the roof.

The house represents a key moment in the evolution ofmodernism, in the gradual stripping back of modellingand depth of the elevation, luxuriating in materialrather than ornament. It is also an extraordinarilybeautiful, if over-specified dwelling. Its details, soderided by Loos, can’t help but give some pleasure intheir infinite attention to detail and in the architects’dedication to the idea that design can enhance everyaspect of domestic life.

In some ways, Loos’s ownVilla Müller, built in Prague in 1930, has somesurprising parallels with his nemesis’s Brussels palace.In other ways it is its diametric opposite. Firstly, there is the modestyof the exterior. Whereas Hoffmann’s house makes it clear that this is arich man’s dwelling in the fine, self-effacing simplicity of whiteNorwegian marble, Loos’s house is genuinely, surprisingly plain. It is

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Josef Hoffman

The double-height living room of Loos's Villa Müller, withbuilt-in fish tanks

Adolf Loos

a white cube clad in render, the cheapest possible material. Itswindows present an odd canvas to the street, irregular, inscrutable, allover the place. The house gives nothing away. It is worth noting thatmany of those architects who had been much influenced by Loos’searly work – Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius andothers – were by this time all designing houses of glass and fauxconcrete, dwellings that appeared lightweight and transparent, opento the landscape their terraces barely distinguishable from theinteriors. Yet Loos had returned to the oldest form, the blocky cube:there were no structural acrobatics, no sculptural spirals or picturewindows. Instead the Villa Müller is all about the interior life.

Loos carved a complex, interlocking series of spaces outof his cube. His genius was to be able to work more fullyin three dimensions than almost any other architectbefore or since. The interior of the villa is a theatricallandscape of mezzanines and surprising glimpses ofinglenooks and settles, conversation corners andgalleries. He called this method “Raumplan” and heinsisted that his houses were designed from the insideout.

The living room is adense, complex, double-height space defined at

one end by steps behind a thick marble-clad screen that creates asculptural divider between this, the house’s principal public space,and the more private spaces beyond. Loos referred to the design ofinteriors as “a chess game in space”. You can see exactly what hemeant as you move through seemingly incessant variations in height,scale, material, geometry and planes that step, recede, pile up andreveal. Every surface is revealed to have further depths – even thegreen marble has a fish tank mounted within it, its glass flush fitted toits flat surface. Other planes have bookshelves or niches sculpted fromthem.

A bay window in what istermed “The Ladies’ Room” creates an intimate, book-lined space with built-in seats clustered around a smalltable and an elegant pendant light. It is almost Arabic inconception, an idea of the women retreating to a moreintimate realm still overlooking the more male mainspace. What might surprise visitors is the richness ofthe interiors. Loos is known for his dislike of ornamentand often compared architecture to English tailoring; arobust tweed suit aimed at function rather than fashion

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Villa Müller, built in Prague in 1930

Another perspective of the living room

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yet which, through its time-proven craft andtechniques, proved perfectly adapted for everyday life.But he was never averse to the exotic in materials. Theinterior is lined with rich green marble and highly-figured veneers of deep chestnut. There are yellow andgreen curtains and a deep, red-brick fireplace. It is likea multi-layered jewellery box, continuously revealingnew treasures and new compartments. The study inparticular has the feel of a ship’s cabin in which thesurfaces and finishes and fittings have been carefullyand richly crafted, yet in which nothing seemssuperfluous.

It isintriguingto comparethe houses.Both werebuilt forengineers,albeit ofdifferent

riches. Hoffmann’s is luxuriously gorgeous and marks amoment in which art, architecture and design combinedto create the ultimate show of wealth and taste. Yet italso proved a dead end. What more could be done? Just as the client in Loos’ story realises his life asa free man has ended, so the Stoclets (Adolphe’s daughters still live in the house) have beenburdened by its beauty and its expense. It is now a Unesco World Heritage Site but also a historicalartefact. For Loos, the idea of the house as a work of art was anathema. “The house,” he wrote, “hasto please everyone, contrary to the work of art, which does not. The work of art is a private matterfor the artist. The house is not.”

‘The Meaning of Home’ by Edwin Heathcote is published by Frances Lincoln, £12.99

Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture critic

©Robert Harding

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