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Adolf Loos and the Aphoristic Style: Rhetorical Practice in Early Twentieth- Century Modern Architecture

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Adolf Loos and the Aphoristic Style: Rhetorical Practice in Early Twentieth- Century Modern Architecture 322 CONSTRUCTING IDENTITY Adolf Loos and the Aphoristic Style: Rhetorical Practice in Early Twentieth- Century Modern Architecture JOHN V. MACIUIKA University of California, Berkeley Adolf Loos is widely regarded as one of the prophets of the Vienna fostered a culture of theatricality that these historians modern movement in architecture. Successive generations of describe as part and parcel of daily life for Vienna's middle, twentieth-century scholars and architects have treated Loos upper, and ruling classes. with varying degrees of sophistication, either analyzing his In view of these historical accounts, it is easier to under- buildings as expressions of his cultural polemics, or connect- stand Adolf Loos's contemporary denunciations of a culture ing him loosely with other Viennese cultural innovators, or that embraced so much historicist ornament that it threatened mining his writings for justifications of new directions in late the very idea of a modern culture. His buildings, in part, were twentieth-century architecture. No work, however, has un- a critique of an urbanity Loos regarded as intrusive and dertaken a systematic examination of Loos's uses of lan- grossly out of step with the times. As other scholars have guage. pointed out, Loos, Wittgenstein and Karl Kraus thematized Loos's early and formative writings place him in a signifi- "the limits of language" by constructing an ethical critique of cant relation to a group known as the Viennese "language Viennese social practice^.^ Loos's relatively blank exteriors circle" because of their commitment to language as a tool of in architecture, the "silences" of Wittgenstein's language cultural reform. The intellectual historian William Johnston, philosophy, and Kraus's denunciations of print media con- author of The Austrian Mind, refers to Loos's associates such ventionalism in his one-man journal, The Torch (Die Fackel) as the writer Karl Kraus as one of several Viennese "therapeu- sought collectively to remove superfluous elements from a tic nihilists," to the poet Peter Altenberg as an "expert at culture seen as carnivalesque and deba~ed.~ dissimulation" and to the philosopher of language Ludwig To Adolf Loos the writer, however, this very sameViennese Wittgenstein, who designed his own house after being in- theatrical tradition left an indelible imprint on his ironic, spired by Loos's ideas, as "a utopian and therapeutic nihilist aphoristic, and at times incendiary prose style. Loos's writing at once."' has been characterized by the architectural historian Reyner These figures shared a cultural and social matrix that has Banham as typically consisting of "not a reasoned argument been characterized by an array of historians of Vienna as but a succession of fast-spieling double-takes and non-sequi- being highly "theatrical," and though the term is significant, turs holding together aprecarious rally of clouds of witness - it is also used very differently by different scholars.' In works cafe Freudianism, cafe-anthropology, (and) cafe criminol- by Carl Schorske, Donald Olsen, and Allan Janik and Stephen ogy...""~ what can we attribute the difference between Toulmin, for example, Viennese tendencies toward perfor- Loos' austere, even "silent" buildings, and the highly 'orna- mance and theatricality could be seen spilling over into the mented' and theatrical quality of his writings? If there is a journalism, cafe culture, and street life of the city. Other connection between aphorism and ornament, how should we historians, like Edward Timms and Michael Steinberg, have understand the seeming contradiction between Loos's writ- interpreted tendencies toward Viennese theatricality much ing style and his architecture? more darkly. To Timms, the imprint of Viennese theatricality Where Loos's architecture flatly rejected the staged his- ran so deep as to amount to a system of "structural dissem- toricism that was common in Vienna's central first district bling" that was reproduced at all levels of political, economic, andits surrounding Ringstrasse, his written and spoken words and social life. In Michael Steinberg's view, theatricality embraced fully the theatrical milieu of Vienna'sfin de siPcle denotes the settings and rituals of a centuries-old ideological public sphere, at the same time using it against itself. As technique-crucial for the maintenance of the multi-national listeners and reviewers were fond of pointing out, Loos and Hapsburg empire - with roots in Catholic baroque culture. his partner on the Central European lecture circuit, the writer Whether in the staged buildings of the Ringstrasse, or in the and cultural critic Karl Kraus, did not lecture so much as rituals of the court, military aristocracy, and opera house, "perform" entertaining critiques of contemporary language, 86TH ACSA ANNUAL MEETING AND TECHNOLOGY CONFERENCE 323 customs, and morals. Within Vienna's urban nucleus ofcafes Toconclude, Carl Schorske's classic workonfin-de-sikcle and close-knit, overlapping social networks, their perfor- Vienna thematizes this city as an "infinite whirl of innova- mances mobilized entertainment to heighten the impact of an tion" in which modern ideas appeared against the background ultimately ethical message, a call for the Viennese to shake off of a fading Habsburg Empire. Yet many Viennese innova- the trappings of historical ornament and imperial custom in tions contained significant continuities with the past, for order to address modern conditions as enlightened city dwell- example, in the debt that aphorisms owe to the Romantic ers. tradition of what is known as the literary "fragment." One Architectural historian Stanford Anderson has argued that prominent theory of late eighteenth-century German Roman- Loos's architectural breakthrough consisted of developing a ticism goes so far as to maintain that critical awareness of how competing conventions and prac- The motif of the unification of the Ancient and Modern, tice could constructively criticize one an~ther.~Loos's writ- as it appears so often in the fragments, always refers to ings, I would add, dismantle and reconstitute the reader's the necessity of bringing about a rebirth of ancient understanding within a dense narrative of aphorisms, hyper- naivete according to modern poetry." bole, and theatrical gestures. This writing style represents a radical abandonment of usual notions of narrative time; this A critical modern awareness is evident here in these narrative structure exemplifies Loos's program for simulta- eighteenth-century roots of the German-speaking world's neous awareness of past and present in actual social practice. aphoristic style, containing a conception of historical simul- Seeking to "innoculate" his students of architecture against taneity and perspective that resurfaces through figures like the mindless copying of classicism, Loos maintained that Nietzsche to influence theliterature of Kraus and the writings, "The present constructs itself on the past just as the past and even the book titles, of Adolf Loos.14Following acentury constructed itself on the preceding past. It has never been of modernization and fragmentation in the Habsurg Empire of another way - nor will it ever be any other way."' Loos's the nineteenth century, Adolf Loos re-tapped these Romantic aphoristic style - exemplified in "Ornament and Crime" but roots at the opening of the twentieth century. His theory of appearing with equal force in many of his other essays - modern culture, in fact, is nicely encapsulated by historian refused to argue linearly or synthetically, or to affirm a false Jonathan Crary's characterization of the nineteenth century wholeness between the realms of form and life. Instead, as the as a whole. He writes: "...the destructive dynamism of architectural theorist Massimo Cacciari has pointed out, modernization [in the nineteenth century] was also a condi- Loos's aphorisms functioned in much the same fashion as tion for a vision that would resist its effects, a revivifying Nietzsche's "tragic quips" - as post-systemic thinking in perception of the present caught up in its own historical which the "suspended dialectics" of art and industry, art and afterimages."I5 The figure of Adolf Loos reminds us that in handicraft, and interior and exterior serve a potentially liber- our own era, among the most arresting visions of modernity ating end.R Echoing Cacciari, the theorist K. Michael Hays are those that transfigure the fragmentation of the present into argues that Loos's rhetorical effects are indicative of the same an intelligible pattern, a pattern somehow continuous with a "highly differentiated subjectivity" that has material ana- meaningful past. logues for Loos in the "insuperable partitions between lan- guages of form" (such as photography, architecture, etc.).' NOTES The success of Loos's autonomous narrative logic, which ' The labels for these three men are used in the work of William I am suggesting embodied his theory of culture in form and Johnston,The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History content, derives in large part from the architect's participation 1848-1938 (Berkeley: UC Press, 1972), pp. 207,223,397. For in the Viennese milieu of theatricality. The leaders in this another account see Dagmar Barnouw, "Loos, Kraus, milieu formed a constellation of actors whose self-conscious Wittgenstein, and the Problem of Authenticity ," in GeraldChapple and Hans H. Schulte, eds., The Turn of the Century: German roles were assumed for the express reason, it was felt, that
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