81An Architecture of Differences
Adolf Loos’s architectural work is further evidence of the need he felt to make dis-
tinctions.^29 Separating the different aspects of life, designing contrasts and bound-
aries—these are the aims of his architecture. It attempts to give a form to the
transitions between public and private, between interior and exterior. It regulates the
relations between men and women, between hosts and guests, between members
of the family and domestic staff. It is an architecture that deploys a very wide range
of expression: it is severely geometrical in its treatment of exteriors; sensuous
in its use of materials (marble, wood, carpeting); theatrical in the layout of the rooms;
classical in some of its detail and references. It is an architecture that cannot be
summed up under a single heading, but which always draws on a number of themes
simultaneously.
Dal Co states that the work of Loos “never attempts to mediate between the
difference of separate parts and situations. It does not hide its multiplicity; at most it
will undertake the task of revealing it completely: it traces partitions and boundaries
because it sees them as synonymous with the principal characteristic of architectural
practice.”^30 This range of idioms is indeed a typical feature of Loos’s architecture. No
matter what the circumstances or the context, the function or the materials, he never
hesitates to draw on another repertoire of forms, and to juxtapose different idioms
in the same design. The precision with which he does this is something that strikes
one in all his buildings. His houses get their very specific character due to the alter-
nation of different atmospheres and to the contrast between light and dark, high and
low, small and large, intimate and formal.
And yet this plurality of spatial experiences is unified in a certain sense, since
the experiences are brought together by the Raumplan, a technique of designing in
three dimensions that Loos regarded as his most important contribution to architec-
ture.^31 Designing for Loos involves a complex three-dimensional activity: it is like a
jigsaw puzzle with spatial units of different heights that have to be defined first and
fitted into a single volume afterward. The best description of it is given by Arnold
Schoenberg:Whenever I am faced with a building by Loos... I see... a concept that
is immediately three-dimensional, something that maybe only some-
one else who had the same qualities could grasp. Everything here is
worked out, imagined, ordered and designed in space... as though all
the shapes were transparent; or as though one’s mental eye were con-
fronted both with the space in all its details and as a whole at the same
time.^32The Raumplangives a form here to a theatricality that, as Beatriz Colomina argues,
is typical of the architecture of Loos’s dwellings: “The house is the stage for the the-
ater of the family, a place where people are born and live and die.”^33 This theatrical-80