Fashioning Vienna: Adolf Loos's Cultural Criticism (review)

Fashioning Vienna: Adolf Loos's Cultural Criticism. Janet Stewart. New York: Routledge, 2000. $19.95 (paper).

While Adolf Loos is well known as one of the key representatives of early modernist architecture, holding his own next to such figures as Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Otto Wagner, a wider public does not yet know the scope of his work and writings. Janet Stewart's fascinating new study finally provides a corrective to this limited and specialized reception of Loos. Focusing consciously on his cultural criticism, her study situates him in the broader context of the evolving discourses of Viennese and transnational European modernism. Upon his sixtieth birthday in 1930, the author reminds us that such prominent figures as Karl Kraus, Arnold Schönberg, Heinrich Mann, Valery Larbaud, and James Joyce paid tribute by calling for the foundation of a future Loos School of Architecture. In the light of this study, his influence on the analysis of mass culture by Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Theodor Adorno can also be seen as much more significant than their occasional references to him acknowledge. Part of this obscurity stems from the late and incomplete publication of many of his widely received public lectures. His famous lecture "Ornament and Crime," for example, was given as early as 1908 but was not published until 1929. In fact, struggle over the release of a significant part of his literary estate continues today. Stewart, who has searched the various archives in Vienna, Berlin, Marbach, Tübingen, and Prague, offers a fuller view of the range of Loos's cultural criticism that encompasses intriguing reflections on America, Anglophilia, leisure, traveling, primitivism, food, fashion, social difference, and the space of the city.

In Stewart's analysis Loos emerges as more complex and contradictory than he has in many earlier accounts that quickly assigned him to classical modernism or else viewed him as an early postmodern anomaly within modernist discourse. Here he comes to life as the unorthodox personality of a simultaneous bourgeois and flâneur, present at both the center and margin of culture, affirming and negating his origin simultaneously. In stressing his indebtedness to bourgeois education and his knowledge of classical antiquity, for example, she rescues him not only from attempts to frame him as an eclectic ironist aloof from tradition but also from those who call him the father of functionalist thought. Rather, as she suggests, he consciously modernized himself after a three-year stay in the United States that allowed him to gain an outsider's perspective upon his own culture. Loos set out to provoke the cultural orthodoxies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and he stubbornly cultivates this perspective by drawing attention to the Empire's anachronistic copresence of premodern and modern lifestyles. His advocacy of Anglo-American lifestyles (not to be taken literally) challenges the reluctance of Austro-Hungarian bourgeois culture to become truly modern--and thus contemporary with itself. Much of his knowledge of America and England, as Stewart convincingly proves, is derivative and idealized, fulfilling the rhetorical purpose of a counterreality invoked to provoke and reanimate issues of cultural perception. In his most famous essay, "Ornament and Crime," for example, Loos challenges decorative conventions by exposing the empty rituals of modern ornament that have lost their cultic function yet are maintained at a high cost of labor. Capitalist bourgeois society, he ironically suggests, hides its own capitalism from itself and wastes considerable economic capital pretending to belong to a phantom world of precapitalist culture.

At the core of Loos's modernism lies his concern with becoming contemporary, an ability to face up to the irreversible cultural transformations that modernity has brought about. It is thus not a question of overturning the status quo of society for the sake of rebellion but rather of rebelling against interpretations of society based upon an outmoded version of the status quo. In this account, modernism stages and reflectively retrieves contemporaneity. His approach is evidenced, as Stewart keenly points...