{"id":591,"date":"2025-10-28T12:18:34","date_gmt":"2025-10-28T12:18:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.billiemuraben.com\/?p=591"},"modified":"2025-11-13T11:06:43","modified_gmt":"2025-11-13T11:06:43","slug":"maharam-storiesa-house-built-out-of-carpetsin-the-principle-of-cladding-one-of-many-polemics-by-adolf-loos-the-austrian-architect-defined-the-professions-task-as-providing-a-warm-a","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.billiemuraben.com\/?p=591","title":{"rendered":"

Maharam Stories<\/p>A HOUSE BUILT OUT OF CARPETS

In The Principle of Cladding, one of many polemics by Adolf Loos, the Austrian architect defined the profession\u2019s task as \u201cproviding a warm and liveable space\u201d. One evolving from the tradition of the coverings of early built structures \u2014 made from animal skins or textiles. \u201cCarpets are warm and liveable\u201d… <\/p>"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In The Principle of Cladding<\/em>, one of many polemics by Adolf Loos, the Austrian architect defined the profession\u2019s task as \u201cproviding a warm and liveable space\u201d. One evolving from the tradition of the coverings of early built structures \u2014 made from animal skins or textiles. \u201cCarpets are warm and liveable,\u201d Loos wrote. \u201cHe [the architect] decides for this reason to spread out one carpet on the floor and to hang up four to form the four walls.\u201d
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\nIn 1903, five years after publishing the essay, Loos designed a bedroom for his wife, Lina. Within the white walls was a layer of \u2018cladding\u2019: white linen curtains strung on a rail that circled the room, a white Angora sheepskin rug that stretched over the bed frame like moss, with linen curtains and \u2018skirts\u2019 masking wardrobes, and draping bedside tables. The interior looks warm, soft, and contained \u2014 enveloping the body in a \u201cbag of fur and cloth\u201d \u2014\u00a0while the semi-sheer curtains also present the bedroom as a sort-of stage, or frame for observation.
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\nLoos saw architecture and interiors as theatrical, and the inhabitants of his buildings both the observer and observed. While seeking comfort and warmth through architecture, Loos\u2019s environments maintained a degree of detachment that meant any softness was balanced with a sense of control. The house was to be designed in harmony with the character of its inhabitants, that character split between the public and private spaces, the social and intimate being.
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\nWhile his public statements were clear to the point of dogmatic, in reality Loos was a mess of contradictions. He argued for the task of the architect being to not \u201cimitate\u201d or dress up materials as something else, and was defensive of the idea that a living space constructed from rugs would be classed an imitation: \u201cThe walls are not really built out of carpets! Certainly not. But these carpets are meant only to be carpets and not building stones.\u201d Loos was tyrannical in his disdain for \u201cimitation and surrogate art\u201d, artificial stone tiles, or painted inlays, and would often hurl his critiques as sexist slurs. He warned against ornament and decor as women\u2019s work, women being \u201cprimitive, ignoble savages\u201d in comparison to the \u201ccool and detached\u201d modern man. But the soft, fluffy, bedroom of Lina Loos, with its curved edges, sheer fabric and shining silver metal, is neither cool or detached. It embraces ornament, high camp and decor, and as is often true, Lina likely had more to do with it than the record shows.
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\nBut this split between the public and private self, of the self in principle and in practice, was a constant in Loos\u2019s life. In public his judgements and moralism led to a rift with the Secession movement, long diatribes, and many drawn-out, public arguments; while in private he had three short marriages to women at least half his age, and was found guilty of child sexual abuse. In \u2018Sex, Lies and Decoration: Adolf Loos and Gustav Klimt\u2019, architectural theorist Beatriz Colomina wrote: \u201cLoos\u2019 public moralism denouncing ornament as a savage perversion is perhaps a pathological symptom of what it attacks, a disguise, a displacement.\u201d
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\nLoos sought the control of the senses within his architecture, and the formal order of the theatre box became the frame within which he worked. A space that is both private and a setting understood for performance or at least a position from which you will be viewed and projected onto. In the house Loos designed for Josephine Baker, she became the \u2018primary object\u2019, with reflective surfaces and openings between rooms shifting attention consistently back on her. But the primacy of the visual is denied through his writing, where he focuses on the \u201cmind\u2019s eye\u201d of the architect, and his sense of what \u201che [the architect] wishes to exert upon the spectator\u201d. The principle that the person inhabiting the house is the spectator, and not he \u2014 the architect \u2014 the external voice, shows how Loos thought about the people he designed for. Loos saw his role as providing a \u201cwarm and liveable space\u201d, but the way that he detached life from work, theory from practice, interior from exterior, dislocated the potential for his work to contain a sense of ease, as the home becomes a stage.<\/div><\/div>
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