Viennese Virtuosos

March 2, 2015Adolf Loos (left) and Josef Hoffmann were both iconoclastic Viennese designers at the turn of the 20th century (photos © ÖNB/Wien and © MAK, respectively). Top: Hoffmann’s “Boudoir d’une grande vedette” (Boudoir of a great star), for the Paris World Exhibition, 1937 (photo © MAK/Georg Mayer)

At the turn of the 20th century, few European cities were as vibrant and forward thinking as Vienna. The Austrian imperialist hub was a metropolitan magnet for great thinkers, many of whom were eager to ditch the historic conventions that had long dominated culture. It was there and then that Sigmund Freud conceived of his game-changing theory of psychoanalysis, for instance, and Arnold Schoenberg departed from the melodic musical norm with his radical, dissonant 12-tone scale. As for architecture and design, Vienna around 1900 was an unrivaled hotbed of groundbreaking design.

“Ways to Modernism: Adolf Loos, Josef Hoffmann, and Their Impact,” on view through April 19 at the MAK, Vienna’s esteemed museum of decorative art and design, takes a look at two Viennese design giants from the period and examines how they carved a path to the new. Hoffmann and Loos had radically different approaches to modernity, and this is the first time an exhibition has examined them side-by-side. To compare and contrast them, MAK curator Christian Witt-Dörring, who organized the exhibition with guest curator Matthias Boeckl, secured major loans, including entire rooms full of pieces on public view for the first time ever, and reproduced architectural models, textiles and other objects to supplement the rich collection of the designers’ works from the collection of the MAK, which just celebrated its 150th anniversary.

A 1909 pillowcase design by Hoffmann demonstrates the designer’s affinity for squares and grids. Photo © MAK

Hoffmann and Loos were both born in 1870 in the Moravia region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and both arrived on the Vienna scene at a time when the rising class of metropolitan, bourgeois consumers needed a new, more modern design paradigm. They didn’t have entirely dissimilar approaches to architectural exteriors, both favoring the pared-down look of smooth planes and clean geometric lines. But that’s where the similarities stop. Hoffmann, who is known for his squares and grids — an early modernist trope — was a founder of the Vienna Secession, the progressive consortium of artists and designers (including Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele), and then in 1903 went on to start the Wiener Werkstätte, a professional workshop devoted to designing and creating furniture, silver, porcelain, book bindings, textiles and more. His interiors were full-scale environments in which objects and décor reflected the uniformly sophisticated taste of a modern consumer.

Loos, on the other hand, argued to emancipate the consumer from objects. His focus was more on space, and he’s known more by his extensive writings and theories on how to better accommodate a modern dweller. Here, Witt-Dörring discusses the exhibition, the defining qualities of Loos and Hoffmann and the idea of the modern.

Curator Witt-Dörring contends that Loos, whose ca. 1900 table lamp is seen here, was not anti-ornamentation, as is commonly thought. Photo © MAK/Georg Mayer

The exhibition begins in 1750 — more than 100 years before Hoffmann and Loos were born. Why so early?

The modern consumer is the big thread of the exhibition, and it was around 1750 that consumers could choose from different tastes for the first time. Chippendale, for instance, introduced a pattern book that wasn’t just for the cabinetmaker but for the clientele. So customers — still aristocrats at this time — could order in Chinese taste or French taste, and so on. It’s the first time that there’s no longer one established norm that you have to follow to be successful in society — the individual gets to express this subjective thing called “taste.”

When does the idea of the “modern” appear?

With Otto Wagner [the late 19th-/early 20th-century Austrian architect, to whom an entire section of the exhibition is devoted], who doesn’t necessarily talk about modernism but rather says the use of historic styles just isn’t timely anymore. He says new technology and new developments in society need new forms. It makes no sense to make a telephone in the Renaissance style. The bourgeoisie needed a modern, civil, Austrian style that didn’t reference history. History was for the aristocrats, since the bourgeoisie had no history yet.

How did Loos and Hoffmann see this call to modernism?

They both look at Wagner as their father, and they both want to give the individual a voice.

“The bourgeoisie needed a modern, civil, Austrian style that didn’t reference history. History was for the aristocrats, since the bourgeoisie had no history yet.”

Hoffmann’s vase in a wooden mount, 1899, has a distinctly modern look. Photo © MAK/Georg Mayer

They then go two very different ways.

Yes. Hoffmann and the Secessionists wanted to give the individual a voice — with the help of an individually created object. His approach was aesthetic. He was creating a new style. Loos, on the other hand, wanted to free the individual from the object. For him, architecture should be an unobtrusive background that allows one to freely express one’s individuality. He was against Hoffmann’s idea of the gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, where the architect-designer creates everything.

Loos has long been associated with his famous 1908 essay, “Ornament and Crime.” Was he really against ornament?

No. Loos was very much misused by the modernists. They think of him as being against ornamentation, but he’s not. He’s against creating a modern ornament. He doesn’t want to create a modern style. He doesn’t need a modern ornament. With him, ornamentation is provided by the materials used: veneers, the grain of marble, the surface of velvet. For furniture, he used Chippendale reproductions.

Loos designed this writing cabinet around 1898. Photo © MAK/Georg Mayer

That doesn’t sound very modern.

Loos thought it was a complete waste of creative energy for humankind to recreate something that in the course of history had already found its ideal shape, and to him, 18th-century Chippendale was ideal. For him, modernity was an attitude. The big problem in an exhibition is how do you visualize an attitude.

So how did you organize the exhibition?

We have a big gallery where one side is Hoffmann and one side is Loos. With Hoffmann, you see his ever-changing styles and lots of individualistic creativity — lots of colors. With Loos it’s mainly brown and a lot of old English furniture. We also reconstructed two bedrooms, one designed in 1902 by Hoffmann for the Salzer house in Vienna, and the other being the bedroom Loos shared with his wife at their Vienna apartment, designed in 1903. For Hoffmann’s room, where we had all the textiles recreated, there is lots of furniture, lots of pattern. In Loos’s room, you don’t see any furniture — it’s only textiles, not designed by him. It’s the beginning of this modern ideal of a perfect harmony between space and matter, and furniture is the enemy because it blocks space. The furniture is hidden behind curtains. The next step in modernist design would be to build the cupboards into the wall.

Loos wasn’t against using furniture though, was he?

No — you need a chair to sit down in. He understood that. But he leads with space.

The exhibition features about 600 objects by Hoffmann, Loos and some key contemporaries. At left is a model of a skyscraper designed by Loos for a famous 1921-22 competition for the Chicago Tribune tower. To the right rear is a reproduction of an armchair model by Hoffmann that has only survived as a photograph, and in the foreground is a reproduction of a chair model he designed in 1929. Photo © Peter Kainz/MAK

Loos is considered a forefather of modernist architecture, influencing Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, among others. What aspects of his practice most stand out today?

He’s embraced for his sustainability, in particular. He was very interested in efficient use of space and contemporary architects have adapted his Raumplan [a system that gives rooms different elevations according to their purposes]. It’s an economical use of space, to build from the inside out and not the other way around. The show traces his influence on a few contemporary architects, including Anna Heringer’s work in Bangladesh.

Is there a particular Loos installation in the show that really sums up his attitude toward design?

For Loos, I’d point out his first Viennese commission, [a wall section with a double door, wall paneling and cupboards from the fireplace room in the Ebenstein tailor shop] from 1897. It’s the first time it’s been exhibited, and it was restored just for the show. Great effort went into the stucco frieze, which was reconstructed using 3-D printing. The wall section shows a fully developed realization of Loos’s ideas about a modern interior — he designed only the parts of the interior that are connected to the walls. He did not design the frieze but chose it from the offerings of cabinet maker-interior design shop, Friedrich Otto Schmidt, so it’s consistent with his conviction to not design modern ornament.

And what of Hoffmann’s should we not miss?

The bedroom set he designed in 1899 for his colleague Ernst Stöhr, a founding member of the Vienna Secession. It is one of his earliest designs for furniture and still shows his dependency on foreign curvilinear inspiration. It’s the first time it’s been exhibited as a set. Compared with Loos’s wall section, it’s clear how different their approaches to modernism were.