"Loos did not seek to remake people,” says Professor Christopher Long

In the second part of the interview, Petr Klíma and the art and architecture historian Christopher Long return to the development of the Vienna Secession around 1900 and to the question of the social and cultural context from which Loos’s architecture emerged. Long presents Art Nouveau not as a mere decorative style, but as the response of its time to the tension between historicism and a modernizing society.

Another key topic of the dialogue is Loos’s concept of the Raumplan. Christopher Long points out that it was not a self-serving architectural concept, but rather a spatial framework for the lives of bourgeois families and, at the same time, part of the development of architecture between tradition and modernism. It is precisely within this tense relationship between an evolutionary and a revolutionary approach, between continuity and discontinuity, that Professor Long situates the work of Adolf Loos. In the interview, he also touches on the question of authorship and the role of Loos’s collaborator, returning to his later years, marked by illness and by the transformations of society around 1930.

The conversation is conducted in English.

What you’ll hear in the interview:

(00:00) intro

(02:16) Vienna Secession

(08:36) Raumplan as a spatial ornament?

(17:33) A forerunner of modernism, or a revolutionary?

(29:27) Late Loos and the Question of Authorship

Editing: Petr Klíma, Jan Balcar, Radka Šámalová

Music, sound design: Jan Balcar

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