Quotes by Adolf Loos

About Adolf Loos:

Adolf Franz Karl Viktor Maria Loos was an Austrian and Czechoslovak architect and influential European theorist of Modern architecture. His essay Ornament and Crime advocated smooth and clear surfaces in contrast to the lavish decorations of the Fin de siècle and also to the more modern aesthetic principles of the Vienna Secession. Loos became a pioneer of modern architecture and contributed a body of theory and criticism of Modernism in architecture and design.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

The work of art shows people new directions and thinks of the future. The house thinks of the present.

Adolf Loos

Does it follow that the house has nothing in common with art and is architecture not to be included in the arts? Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else that fulfils a function is to be exclud...

Adolf Loos

Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect's task therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise.

Adolf Loos

The house has to please everyone, contrary to the work of art which does not. The work is a private matter for the artist. The house is not.

Adolf Loos

The work of art is brought into the world without there being a need for it. The house satisfies a requirement. The work of art is responsible to none; the house is responsible to everyone. The work of art wants to draw people out of their state of c...

Adolf Loos

The house has to serve comfort. The work of art is revolutionary; the house is conservative.

Adolf Loos

Man loves everything that satisfies his comfort. He hates everything that wants to draw him out of his acquired and secured position and that disturbs him. Thus he loves the house and hates art.

Adolf Loos

Changes in the traditional way of building are only permitted if they are an improvement. Otherwise stay with what is traditional, for truth, even if it be hundreds of years old has a stronger inner bond with us than the lie that walks by our side.

Adolf Loos

The law courts must appear as a threatening gesture toward secret vice. The bank must declare: here your money is secure and well looked after by honest people.

Adolf Loos

Be truthful, nature only sides with truth.

Adolf Loos

The room has to be comfortable; the house has to look habitable.

Adolf Loos

Be not afraid of being called un-fashionable.

Adolf Loos

At the beginning of the nineteenth century we abandoned tradition, it's at that point that I intend to renew it because the present is built on the past just as the past was built on the times that went before it.

Adolf Loos

Supply and demand regulate architectural form.

Adolf Loos

It does not do to use it with forms whose origin is intimately bound up with a specific material simply because no technical difficulties stand in the way.

Adolf Loos

The Potemkin city of which I wish to speak here is none other than our dear Vienna herself.

Adolf Loos

The unadorned gentleman's suit was the product of the change from rigid status to social structures constantly shifting in response to the forces of modern capitalism, becoming ever more egalitarian in both appearance and reality.

Adolf Loos

L'architecture éveille en l'homme des états d'âme.. La tâche des architectes est de préciser ces états d'âmes.

Adolf Loos

Author Bio

  • NameAdolf Loos
  • DescriptionCzech architect
  • Born1870
  • Died1933
  • CountryAustria
  • ProfessionArchitect; Writer