“Both a continuator of tradition and a pioneer of modernism, Loos did not seek to remake people,” says Professor Christopher Long
# Adolf Loos, Christopher Long, historie architektury, Od západu nefouká?, ornament, Petr Klíma, podcast, publikace, raumplan
Vloženo12. 02. 2026
Text Radka Šámalová
In the second part of the interview, Petr Klíma and the art and architecture historian Christopher Long return to the development of the Vienna Secession around 1900 and to the question of the social and cultural context from which Loos’s architecture emerged. Long presents Art Nouveau not as a mere decorative style, but as the response of its time to the tension between historicism and a modernizing society.
Another key topic of the dialogue is Loos’s concept of the Raumplan. Christopher Long points out that it was not a self-serving architectural concept, but rather a spatial framework for the lives of bourgeois families and, at the same time, part of the development of architecture between tradition and modernism. It is precisely within this tense relationship between an evolutionary and a revolutionary approach, between continuity and discontinuity, that Professor Long situates the work of Adolf Loos. In the interview, he also touches on the question of authorship and the role of Loos’s collaborator, returning to his later years, marked by illness and by the transformations of society around 1930.
The conversation is conducted in English.
What you’ll hear in the interview:
02:16 – Vienna Secession
“Art Nouveau grew out of a problem. It wasn’t an ornamental construct per se, it was a question. In the 1870s and into the 1880s, it started to be clear to those who were really paying attention that there was a disconnect between historicism, this revival of the past, and what was happening more broadly with industrialization and modernization and so forth. […] The other possibility we have here to evolve a new way of expressing these ideas is through the forms of nature. Art Nouveau is simply this recourse to nature on the one hand, and a rejection of the historical past on the other. And it is absolutely correct that when it lands in Vienna – it doesn’t come to Vienna directly, it comes to Paris, Brussels, Lyon, and then eventually to Munich, and then from Munich to Vienna. So Vienna’s relatively late in adopting the language of Art Nouveau. […] But the second issue is what you’ve said. When it lands in Vienna, does it hit fertile soil? And the answer is yes, because the really great thing about Art Nouveau is it allows especially the nouveau riche to articulate their own wealth and their own perceptions about their world. So yes, it is Viennese in the sense that it’s very much about show and ostentation and so forth.”
08:36 – Raumplan as a spatial ornament?
“Ornament is what you feel by looking at something. In a sense. You look at something, you get a feeling. And Loos’s intentionality in the Raumplan is, I believe, strongly associated. I did this in one of my books, as you know, the Nový prostor (New Space) book. It’s very much about how one experiences any kind of space or spatial sequence. So, yes, it’s also about other senses. It’s about what you feel, it’s about what you see. It’s about how your body engages a building, for example, through movement. And in that sense, yes, the buildings become conveyors of mood in the way that ornament becomes a conveyor of mood or conveyor of ideas or a conveyor of feelings. So, yeah, in that sense, yes, also because Loos is simply interested in surface. He’s just interested in surface in a different way. There is a large wall of blue, for example, which you see in Villa Müller when you walk in and you walk to the cloakroom. This is incredibly blue. Remarkable thing. Is that an ornament? In a certain sense, yes.
17:33 – A forerunner of modernism, or a revolutionary?
“[…] there’s been a tendency to read Loos either as a progenitor, as a maker of modernism, because he’s among the first to develop in architecture that’s completely taut and white, looking like the great international architecture of the 1920s. He does this already before World War I. So he makes these white boxes that seem to predict what’s going to happen in modernism. And that’s the way he’s usually presented in histories of modernism. He’s this forerunner or progenitor or pioneer of modernism. So that’s one way to read Loos. Another way of reading Loos is the way we talked about already. And that is you have Loos, the bourgeois, who is working in an evolutionary way and continuing these ideas of modernism. So that’s absolutely true as well. But it’s also true that Loos does something as an architect that’s utterly revolutionary, and he knows it, he even says it. And that is, he begins to think about architecture spatially in a completely new way – the Raumplan. And how does one explain that and be consistent with Loos’s thoughts? Until you’re asking me the question, I didn’t exactly have the answer. And as soon as you asked me the question that way, I realized that he actually gives us the answer very early in one of the essays he writes for the Jubilee exhibition, when he tries to define what it is what designers should be doing. And he says, can you use things from the past? And he says, yes, you can use things from the past as long as they still have usefulness in the present. But if they don’t have usefulness in the present, you have to discard them and make something new. There’s the key thought […].”
29:27 – Late Loos and the Question of Authorship
Loos is not as intellectually adept or as adept as a thinker in the later years of his life. I think that probably had to do with his illness. You know, he had syphilis. And syphilis in its tertiary form, in its later form, begins to affect your mind. […] Heinrich Kulka, who worked for him in Vienna, is taking on more and more responsibility for the continuation of Loos’s work. And in Prague, Karel Lhota is doing more and more for Loos. That is also obvious. What’s more, Lhota writes about it in a really interesting way—for example, about how Loos needs more and more from him over time. He is quite explicit about it. It’s very clear when he testifies to his trial for child molestation in 1928, that he’s a little… not quite right in the head. So, yes, I think from the mid-1920s on, he’s just declining in his ability to think. He’s not the sharp thinker that he was in 1909, 1910. And he’s also bitter. And that bitterness, it articulates or expresses itself in other ways. So, no, it’s not the same Loos, unfortunately. It’s very sad to see his decline, but he’s declining markedly in those later years.
Key figures, projects, and publications discussed:
Christopher Long, The New Space: Movement and Experience in Viennese Modern Architecture, 2016.
Adolf Loos in collaboration with Karel Lhota, children’s room in the Villa Müller in Prague, 1928-1930. Photo: Petr Klíma, 2023.
Adolf Loos in collaboration with Karel Lhota, an example of the Raumplan in the Villa Müller in Prague, 1928-1930. Photo: Petr Klíma, 2023.
Adolf Loos, an example of the Raumplan in the Landhaus Khuner in Payerbach, Austria (1929-1930). Source: WikiArquitectura.
Heinrich Kulka (1900-1971). Source: Kulka Estate.
Karel Lhota (1894-1947). Source: 50 let státních československých průmyslových škol v Plzni. 1885–1935, Pilsen 1936.
Prof. Christopher Long, Ph.D., studied at the universities of Graz, Munich, and Vienna, and received his doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin in 1993. From 1994 to 1995, he taught at the Central European University in Prague. His long-term focus is on the history of modern architecture, with a particular emphasis on Central Europe between 1880 and the present. Trained in history rather than architecture, he draws on approaches from cultural and intellectual history, as well as political and economic history. He has studied issues of cultural representation in architecture, the broader ideological context of architectural theory in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the development of architectural education. Professor Long’s interests also include modern design in Austria, the Czech lands, and the United States, as well as graphic design. He has worked on several exhibitions and publishes on a wide range of topics. In 2022, he received an honorary doctorate from the Prague Academy of Fine Arts and Design. Since 2017, six publications dedicated to the works of Adolf Loos and his contemporaries have been published in Czech translation. This year, they should be followed by a Czech version of the aforementioned book, Adolf Loos: Ruminations and Revisions. Essays.
