Adolf Loos - Life

Life

Born in 1870 in Brünn (Brno) in the Moravia region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to an ethnically German family, Loos was nine when his father, a stonemason, died. He completed technical school in Liberec, which is now Technical University Liberec (commemorated by a plaque located in front of Pavilion H), and later studied at Dresden Technical University before moving to Vienna.

Loos stayed in America for three years, where he had an uncle living in Philadelphia. In his first year he visited the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and appreciated the work of Louis Sullivan. He visited St. Louis and did odd jobs in New York. Loos returned to Vienna in 1896 a man of taste and intellectual refinement, immediately entering the Viennese intelligentsia. His friends subsequently included Ludwig Wittgenstein, Arnold Schönberg, Peter Altenberg and Karl Kraus. He quickly established himself as the preferred architect of Vienna’s cultured bourgeoisie. Searching for marble in 1904 he first visited the island of Skyros and was confrontated with the cubic architecture of the Greek islands. When the empire collapsed and divided into independent states after World War I, he was awarded Czechoslovakian citizenship by President Masaryk.

Diagnosed with cancer in 1918, his stomach, appendix and part of his intestine were removed. His personal life was tumultuous. In July 1902, Loos married 21-year-old Carolina Catherina Obertimpfler (Lina), a drama student. The marriage ended in 1905. In 1919, Loos married 20-year-old Elsie Altmann, a dancer and operetta star and the Austrian-born daughter of Adolf Altmann and Jeannette Gruenblatt. They divorced seven years later. Loos married his third wife, writer and photographer Claire Beck, in 1929. She was the daughter of his clients Otto and Olga Beck, and thirty-five years his junior. They were divorced on April 30, 1932. Following their divorce, Claire Beck Loos wrote Adolf Loos Privat, a literary work of snapshot-like vignettes about Loos’ character, habits and sayings, which was published by the Johannes-Presse in Vienna in 1936. The book was intended to raise funds for Adolf Loos’ tomb.

By the time he was fifty he was nearly deaf and required people to speak to him through an ear horn. In 1928 he was disgraced by a paedophilia scandal and at his death in 1933 at 62 he was penniless. He died in Kalksburg near Vienna. Following his death in 1933, Loos’ body was moved to Vienna’s Zentralfriedhof to rest among the great artists and musicians of the city – including Arnold Schoenberg, Peter Altenberg, and Karl Kraus, all some of Loos’ closest friends and associates.