Adolf Loos Quotes

#1. It does not do to use it with forms whose origin is intimately bound up with a specific material simply because no technical difficulties stand in the way.

Adolf Loos

#2. Be not afraid of being called un-fashionable.

Adolf Loos

#3. The work of art is brought into the world without there being a need for it. The house satisfies a requirement. The work of art is responsible to none; the house is responsible to everyone. The work of art wants to draw people out of their state of comfort.

Adolf Loos

#4. Be truthful, nature only sides with truth.

Adolf Loos

#5. The house has to please everyone, contrary to the work of art which does not. The work is a private matter for the artist. The house is not.

Adolf Loos

#6. Changes in the traditional way of building are only permitted if they are an improvement. Otherwise stay with what is traditional, for truth, even if it be hundreds of years old has a stronger inner bond with us than the lie that walks by our side.

Adolf Loos

#7. Does it follow that the house has nothing in common with art and is architecture not to be included in the arts? Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else that fulfils a function is to be excluded from the domain of art.

Adolf Loos

#8. The house has to serve comfort. The work of art is revolutionary; the house is conservative.

Adolf Loos

#9. The Potemkin city of which I wish to speak here is none other than our dear Vienna herself.

Adolf Loos

#10. If nothing were left of an extinct race but a single button, I would be able to infer, form the shape of that button, how these people dressed, built their houses, how they lived, what was their religion, their art, their mentality.

Adolf Loos

#11. the development of culture is concurrent with the removal of ornaments from objects of daily use

Adolf Loos

#12. Tattooed men who are not behind bars are either latent criminals or degenerate aristocrats. If someone who is tattooed dies in freedom, then he does so a few years before he would have committed murder.

Adolf Loos

#13. At the beginning of the nineteenth century we abandoned tradition, it's at that point that I intend to renew it because the present is built on the past just as the past was built on the times that went before it.

Adolf Loos

#14. The work of art shows people new directions and thinks of the future. The house thinks of the present.

Adolf Loos

#15. Supply and demand regulate architectural form.

Adolf Loos

#16. The unadorned gentleman's suit was the product of the change from rigid status to social structures constantly shifting in response to the forces of modern capitalism, becoming ever more egalitarian in both appearance and reality.

Adolf Loos

#17. Lack of ornamentation is a sign of spiritual strength.

Adolf Loos

#18. The law courts must appear as a threatening gesture toward secret vice. The bank must declare: here your money is secure and well looked after by honest people.

Adolf Loos

#19. I have emerged victorious from my thirty years of struggle. I have freed mankind from superfluous ornament.

Adolf Loos

#20. The room has to be comfortable; the house has to look habitable.

Adolf Loos

#21. Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect's task therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise.

Adolf Loos

#22. Man loves everything that satisfies his comfort. He hates everything that wants to draw him out of his acquired and secured position and that disturbs him. Thus he loves the house and hates art.

Adolf Loos

#23. All art is erotic. The first ornament to have been invented, the cross, was of erotic origin. It was the first work of art. A horizontal stroke: the woman lying down. A vertical stroke: the male who penetrates her.

Adolf Loos