I. B. Tauris & Company Adolf Loos: The Art of Architecture (International Library of Architecture)

Regarded as one of the most significant prophets of modern architecture,Adolf Loos was a cultural star from early on. His work is emblematic of the turn-of-the-century generation split between the traditionalist culture of the nineteenth century and the innovative modernism of the twentieth. His essay Ornament and Crime equated superfluous ornament with tattooing in order to tell modern Europeans that they should know better.But the negation of ornament was supposed to reveal good style; and an indefatigable ironist has been taken too literally in denying architecture as a fine art. Without normalizing Loos's edgy radicality, Masheck argues that he affirmed authentic tradition as well as utility,even comfort,while attacking the Vienna Secession as a pseudo-modern font of indulgently decorative applied art. No simple anti-architect, Masheck's Loos is an unruly yet integrally canonical artist-architect. This is a brilliantly written revisionist reading of a perennially popular founding modernist. Review A monumental contribution to the Loos literature - ambitiously conceived, thoroughly provocative, and deeply insightful. Joan Ockman, Distinguished Senior Fellow, School of Design, University of Pennsylvania Masheck ... also ... demonstrates ... how [Loos s] abstract approach to form anticipated in a specific way the discourse of American minimalist art. Kenneth Frampton, Ware Professor of Architecture, Columbia University A provocative take on Adolf Loos at a time when criticism has exhausted its theoretical resources, and the near past seems almost out of reach. Gevork Hartoonian, Professor of Architecture, University of Canberra This penetrating book ... guide[s] us round the paradoxes of this dandified enemy of ornamental invention whose most prominent masterpiece is a bronze and-marble colonnaded gentlemen s outfitter! --Joseph Rykwert, Cret Professor of Architecture Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania About the Author Joseph Masheck, Professor of Art History at Hofstra University,in Hempstead, New York,was editor-in-chief of Artforum in the late 1970s.He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and, in 2006-10, Centenary Fellow of Edinburgh College of Art. Previous books include Building-Art: Modern Architecture Under Cultural Construction (Cambridge University Press, 1993) and Marcel Duchamp in Perspective,2nd edn (Da Capo, 2002).