Whether as a painting or as a photograph or even as a sculpture, portraiture is one of the main achievement of Western art. Perhaps no other culture has been so interested in the human likeness, focusing on the face, its moods, its expressions, as the revelation of a...
Adolf Loos Experimental Architecture and the Question of Windows Before the Great War, Vienna was the city of Otto Wagner, and Loos would have to wait a decade before he would be allowed to build to his own standard of “purity” or lack of inauthentic decoration. Like...
The Architectural Gadfly of Vienna The Origins of Ornament and Crime As if to distance himself from the culture that celebrated and commissioned Otto Wagner, the renegade architect, Adolf Loos (1870-1933) posed for photographs as a common man, a man of the people, He...
The Great War The Great War is known to have inspired some of the most powerful and moving poetry—from both sides—ever written in reaction to combat and death. Literature which had been mired in nineteenth century conventions was liberated by innovative uses of...
THE WIENER WERKSTÄTTE PROJECTS Overshadowed by the Bauhaus designs of the 1920s, the Wiener Werkstätte experiment at the turn of the century laid the groundwork for modern design. Tucked away in Eastern Europe, the city of Vienna was off the beaten path of the...
