Sadabad complex to display Adolf Loos’s architectural designs

A total of 50 photos of the buildings and monuments designed by Loos will be displayed at the Melal Museum of the Sadabad Cultural Complex until February 3.

The exhibit will then travel across the country to the cities of Qom, Isfahan, Shiraz, Chabahar, and Kish.

Adolf Loos (1870-1933) ranks as one of the most important pioneers of the modern movement in architecture. Ironically, his influence was based largely on a few interior designs and a body of controversial essays.

Loos’s buildings were rigorous examples of austere beauty, ranging from conventional country cottages to planar compositions for storefronts and residences.

In his essay “Ornament and Crime” he repudiated the florid style of the Vienna Secession, the Austrian version of Art Nouveau. In this and many other essays he contributed to the elaboration of a body of theory and criticism of modernism in architecture.

To Adolf Loos, the house did not belong to art because the house must please everyone, unlike a work of art, which does not need to please anyone. The only exception, that is, the only constructions that belong both to art and architecture, were the monument and the tombstone.

Adolf Loos felt that the rest of architecture, which by necessity must serve a specific end, must be excluded from the realm of art.

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