Branscome, E;
(2020)
Giving Voice to a Building: A Critical Analysis of Adolf Loos's Landhaus Khuner.
ARENA Journal of Architectural Research
, 5
(1)
, Article 1. 10.5334/ajar.186.
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Abstract
In 1930 Adolf Loos completed two buildings: the (famous, urban) Müller House in Prague and the (not famous, rural) Landhaus Khuner in Payerbach, Lower Austria, some 90 kilometres from Vienna – two designs that could not be more different in appearance. While the Müller House is defined by the austere rectilinearity of its compact white cubic aesthetic, the Landhaus Khuner, being a country retreat designed for Paul Khuner and family as a vacation home, is almost rustic in its look with log-and-stone construction sheltered under a pitched roof and exterior colours ranging from grey and dark brown to green and red. Significantly, in the literature on Loos written after the Second World War the Müller House is hailed as a masterpiece, exemplary of the architect’s rejection of ornamentation, even the culmination of his oeuvre. Since then there has been a consistent flow of interest in the Prague house from the likes of Beatriz Colomina. Around the Landhaus Khuner, in contrast, there has developed only a sort of hush – maybe precisely because it differs so strongly from Loos’s other realised projects. Why this is the case, and why we should re-examine the Landhaus Khuner, forms the subject of this essay. What is argued is that we need to embrace a broader cultural understanding of Modernism, something proposed for instance in the concept of Critical Regionalism by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, yet which in practice requires even wider interpretations of the forces and counter-forces involved in the pursuit of inter-war Modernist architecture in countries such as Austria.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Giving Voice to a Building: A Critical Analysis of Adolf Loos's Landhaus Khuner |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.5334/ajar.186 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.5334/ajar.186 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © 2020 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/. |
| Keywords: | Adolf Loos, Critical Regionalism, Austria, Landhaus Khuner, Modernism, Postmodernism, Alpine Architecture, Tourism, Urban/Rural |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment > The Bartlett School of Architecture |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10106156 |
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