Adolf Loos

In his 1910 essay Ornament and Crime, Loos attacked excessive decoration as wasteful and culturally backward. The essay became a key text for modernist debates about plain surfaces, function, and taste.

The Looshaus, completed near Vienna's Michaelerplatz in the early 1910s, shocked many viewers because its upper facade was almost bare. Its plain windows and lack of ornament clashed with imperial Vienna's decorated historic setting.

Raumplan means planning by interconnected volumes rather than by flat, repeated floors. In houses such as Villa Muller in Prague, completed in 1930, Loos used rooms of different heights and levels to match their social and practical functions.

Loos worked in the same cultural world as fin-de-siecle Vienna, but he opposed much of the decorative style associated with the Secession. His writing and buildings influenced later modernist architects who valued restraint and spatial complexity.