In this book of essays, noted architectural historian Christopher Long examines some of the many influences that shaped the work of the great architect Adolf Loos. Long's finely tuned essays are exploratory journeys and brief excursions into Loos's rich and complex intellectual world. Drawing from his detailed study of historical sources, Long presents new findings and sets the record straight, correcting errors and assumptions that have long been accepted as fact. He is deeply interested in Loos as an architect, but he is even more drawn to his profound and unique mind. Loos, as Long writes, saw that the problem of modernism was not the problem of style, but the problem of understanding how the world was changing.

Revolutionary essays on design, aesthetics and materialism - from one of the great masters of modern architecture Adolf Loos, the great Viennese pioneer of modern architecture, was a hater of the fake, the fussy and the lavishly decorated, and a lover of stripped down, clean simplicity. He was also a writer of effervescent, caustic wit, as shown in this selection of essays on all aspects of design and aesthetics, from cities to glassware, furniture to footwear, architectural training to why 'the lack of ornament is a sign of intellectual power'. Translated by Shaun Whiteside With an epilogue by Joseph Masheck

The Vienna Jubilee Exhibition of 1898 provided the occasion for these remarkable essays by the Austrian architect, theorist, and irreverent critic of his own culture, Adolf Loos. The rational underpinnings of his later accusation that "ornament is crime," first appear in these polemical thrusts at the stylized work of Viennese sucessionists Joseph Hoffmann, Otto Wagner, Hermann Obrist, and Gustav Klimt, among others.

In this book of eight essays, the noted architectural historian Christopher Long takes on the meanings of Adolf Loos's writings and design work, the cultural world in which he was embedded, and how he was regarded by the critics and public. Long exposes and explodes old myths about Loos, fostering in the process a new, brilliant, and compelling view of one of the modern architecture's key protagonists.

Widely regarded as one of the most significant prophets of modern architecture, Adolf Loos was a celebrity in his own day. His work was emblematic of the turn-of-the-century generation that was torn between the traditional culture of the nineteenth century and the innovative modernism of the twentieth. His essay 'Ornament and Crime' equated superfluous ornament and 'decorative arts' with tattooing in an attempt to tell modern Europeans that they should know better. But the negation of ornament was supposed to reveal, not negate, good style; and an incorrigible ironist has been taken too literally in denying architecture as a fine art. Without normalizing his edgy radicality, Masheck argues that Loos' masterful "astylistic architecture" was an appreciation of tradition and utility and not, as most architectural historians have argued, a mere repudiation of the florid style of the Vienna Secession. Masheck reads Loos as a witty, ironic rhetorician who has all too often been taken at face value. Far from being the anti-architect of the modern era, Masheck's Loos is 'an unruly yet integrally canonical artist-architect'. He believed in culture, comfort, intimacy and privacy and advocated the evolution of artful architecture. This is a brilliantly written revisionist reading of a perennially popular architect.

Few twentieth-century writers on architecture and design have enjoyed the renown of Reyner Banham. Born and trained in England and a U.S. resident starting in 1976, Banham wrote incisively about American and European buildings and culture. Now readers can enjoy a chronological cross-section of essays, polemics, and reviews drawn from more than three decades of Banham's writings. The volume, which includes discussions of Italian Futurism, Adolf Loos, Paul Scheerbart, and the Bauhaus as well as explorations of contemporary architecture by Frank Gehry, James Stirling, and Norman Foster, conveys the full range of Banham's belief in industrial and technological development as the motor of architectural evolution. Banham's interests and passions ranged from architecture and the culture of pop art to urban and industrial design. In brilliant analyses of automobile styling, mobile homes, science fiction films, and the American predilection for gadgets, he anticipated many of the preoccupations of contemporary cultural studies. Los Angeles, the city that Banham commemorated in a book and a film, receives extensive attention in essays on the Santa Monica Pier, the Getty Museum, Forest Lawn cemetery, and the ubiquitous freeway system. Eminently readable, provocative, and entertaining, this book is certain to consolidate Banham's reputation among architects and students of contemporary culture. For those acquainted with his writing, it offers welcome surprises as well as familiar delights. For those encountering Banham for the first time, it comprises the perfect introduction.

This volume gathers the few essays written by the quirky Austrian architect Loos (d. 1933) as well as student notes of his lectures. The essays respond in part to his best-known essay "Ornament and crime", in which he criticized ornament as a waste of labor. Among other topics the essays celebrate classical architecture, critique certain inefficient habits (including eating goulash at 10 am instead of having a big American-style breakfast), argue that architecture is not one of the arts, and consider the relation of Viennese coffee houses to domestic architecture. The volume is not indexed. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR