Alte Meister Komödie

As part of the 57th International Prize Bugatti-Segantini, Raumplan takes part to the project Re-drawing the theory / Re-drawing the House (curated by Parasite 2.0) by displaying three images from the Loos Archive of the Albertina Museum in Wien together with three drawings. These images and drawings, with extreme synthesis, provide a hint of the long evolution of Loos’ career as an “interior architect”; ranging from the design for his own tiny apartment in Vienna to the most notorious and celebrated of his projects: the Müller villa in Prague.

Mainly known for the reductionist aesthetic of its facades and its controversy with the romantic Jugendstil movement, Adolf Loos was also the greatest “interior architect” of the twentieth century. Since the beginning of his career in 1898, Loos’ main area of activity was in designing new interiors for existing apartments and shops. During his career he produced some of the most spectacular interiors and domestic landscapes in the history of archiecture: in addition to the aforementioned interiors of Villa Muller in Prague, there are Karma villa in Montreux, Villa Rufer and the American Bar in Vienna.

Such as the painting by Tintoretto contemplated in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna by the protagonist of the Alte Meister Komödie by Thomas Bernhard, Loos’ work retains its problematic actuality despite decades of relentless scrutiny by critics and amateurs.