Adolf Loos

Looshaus on Michaelerplatz (Vienna, 1911), Villa Müller (Prague, 1930), the American Bar (Vienna, 1908). Author of the 1908 essay *Ornament and Crime*.

*Raumplan* — the inside of a Loos house is a series of differently-sized rooms at offset levels, the volumes designed for use rather than the floor plate fixed to a single level. The exterior is severe, the interior intricate and material-rich.

His polemic against ornament shaped the rhetoric of European modernism well after his rather subtler buildings had stopped influencing it directly.