Adolf Loos Quotes

• The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects.

  Adolf Loos

  Topics in Uncategorized

• I have emerged victorious from my thirty years of struggle. I have freed mankind from superfluous ornament.

  Adolf Loos

  Topics in Uncategorized

• The work of art is brought into the world without there being a need for it. The house satisfies a requirement. The work of art is responsible to none; the house is responsible to everyone. The work of art wants to draw people out of their state of comfort.

  Adolf Loos

• The room has to be comfortable; the house has to look habitable.

  Adolf Loos

• The Potemkin city of which I wish to speak here is none other than our dear Vienna herself.

  Adolf Loos

• The law courts must appear as a threatening gesture toward secret vice. The bank must declare: here your money is secure and well looked after by honest people.

  Adolf Loos

• The house has to serve comfort. The work of art is revolutionary; the house is conservative.

  Adolf Loos

• Supply and demand regulate architectural form.

  Adolf Loos

• Man loves everything that satisfies his comfort. He hates everything that wants to draw him out of his acquired and secured position and that disturbs him. Thus he loves the house and hates art.

  Adolf Loos

• It does not do to use it with forms whose origin is intimately bound up with a specific material simply because no technical difficulties stand in the way.

  Adolf Loos

• Does it follow that the house has nothing in common with art and is architecture not to be included in the arts? Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else that fulfils a function is to be excluded from the domain of art.

  Adolf Loos

• Changes in the traditional way of building are only permitted if they are an improvement. Otherwise stay with what is traditional, for truth, even if it be hundreds of years old has a stronger inner bond with us than the lie that walks by our side.

  Adolf Loos

• Be truthful, nature only sides with truth.

  Adolf Loos

• Be not afraid of being called un-fashionable.

  Adolf Loos

• At the beginning of the nineteenth century we abandoned tradition, it’s at that point that I intend to renew it because the present is built on the past just as the past was built on the times that went before it.

  Adolf Loos

• The house has to please everyone, contrary to the work of art which does not. The work is a private matter for the artist. The house is not.

  Adolf Loos

  Topics in Work

  Tags in Contrary, Artist, House, Matter

• The work of art shows people new directions and thinks of the future. The house thinks of the present.

  Adolf Loos

  Tags in Architecture

• Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect’s task therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise.

  Adolf Loos

  Tags in Architecture

Adolf Loos (18)

Birth:	10th December, 1870
Death:	23rd August, 1933
Nationality:	Austrian
Profession:	Architect

About

Adolf Franz Karl Viktor Maria Loos was an Austro-Hungarian architect. He was influential in European Modern architecture, and in his essay Ornament and Crime he repudiated the florid style of the Vienna Secession, with the Austrian version of Art Nouveau. In this and many other essays he contributed to the elaboration of a body of theory and criticism of Modernism in architecture.

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