As Hoffmann’s founding of the Wiener Werkstätte indicates, he was at heart less an architect than a decorator, like so many of the leading English and Scottish designers of this period and the immediately preceding one. The important commission to build a large and extremely luxurious mansion on the edge of Brussels in 1905, the Palais Stoclet at 373 Avenue de Tervueren, gave his decorative ambitions a free rein (Plate [154A]). Yet the exterior of this has a good deal of the geometrical clarity of the Convalescent Home and rather more of Wagner’s architectonic values. The carefully ordered asymmetrical composition is dominated by the stair-tower, somewhat as the best Italian Villas of the previous century were dominated by their off-centre belvederes. The walls appear to be no more than thin skins of marble plaques, like Wagner’s, with the frequent and regularly spaced windows brought forward into the same surface plane. A decorative edging of gilded metal defines these smooth wall planes, giving the whole something of the fragile look of D’Aronco’s exhibition buildings. This is especially true of such a complex accent as the tower, with its tall stair-window.
The Stoclet house, as finished after six years in 1911, has some very fine interiors, cold and formal but sumptuously simple in their use of various marbles. The marble is quite undecorated on the delicate rectangular piers in the two-storey stair-hall; but in the dining-room it carries inlaid patterns by Gustav Klimt of almost Art Nouveau elaboration. The effect is rather curious, somewhat resembling characteristic English interiors by Voysey and his contemporaries carried out, not in stained or painted wood, but in figured and polished marbles; yet undoubtedly this is one of the most consistent and notable great houses of the twentieth century in Europe. Seeking to provide a new sort of elegance that even the best English domestic work lacked, Hoffmann achieved here an urbane distinction only approached by Gill and the Greenes at this time in America. His houses in Vienna, such as that at 5-7 Invalidenstrasse of 1911 and the suburban one at 14-16 Gloriettegasse in Hietzing, are not in a class with the Palais Stoclet but more comparable to Olbrich’s or Behrens’s houses of this period in Germany. Work of similar character and equal distinction was done by Fabiani in Vienna before he settled in Gorizia in 1920. Very Hoffmann-like indeed is his building for the publisher Artaria at 9 Kohlmarkt of 1901. His Urania in the Uraniagasse of 1910 also rivals Hoffmann’s best.
Successor to Wagner in general esteem, and himself a professor at the Kunstgewerbeschule, Hoffman developed his personal style no further in the work he did after the First World War. At the Austrian Pavilion in the Exhibition of Decorative Arts of 1925 in Paris—an exhibition organized in part to reclaim for France the primacy in the arts and crafts of decoration that had by this time passed to Vienna, largely because of Hoffmann’s leadership—the rather Neo-Rococo stuccoed block that he provided was much less advanced in character than the greenhouse-like portion designed by Behrens. However, his low-cost flats in the Felix-Mottlstrasse in Vienna, built like those of Behrens in the mid twenties, retain a good deal of the quality of his early sanatorium at Purkersdorf. Crisp and clean, they are distinctly less blank and ponderous than Behrens’s, if also less advanced in design that those by Josef Frank (b. 1885). Frank, a somewhat younger Viennese architect of considerable ability but lesser reputation than Hoffmann, left Vienna to settle in Sweden when the Nazis took over Austria.
The international acclaim that Viennese low-cost housing of this period received when new seems rather exaggerated now. From the first its significance was more political and sociological than architectural. It happened to be built, moreover, mostly by men not of the newest generation of architects at just the time when an architectural revolution was taking place in France and Holland and Germany (see Chapters [22] and [23]). Henceforth that revolution, brilliantly illustrated as regards low-cost housing in the German Werkbund’s international exhibition of 1927 at Stuttgart, would affect most notably the design of such projects throughout the western world. The Viennese housing exhibition of 1930, a modest counterpart to that in Stuttgart, came too late to reform the local tradition, which largely survived even after the Second World War.
The work of Hoffmann’s exact contemporary Loos dates less than his and was of the greatest importance in providing inspiration to the modern architects of the second generation who brought about the revolution of the twenties. This inspiration from Loos is comparable in significance to that which the younger architects found in the work of Wright and of Perret. Loos, unlike other Austrians of his period, was primarily interested in architecture, not in decoration—indeed, he wrote in 1908 an article[[434]] claiming that ‘ornament is crime’, an attitude shared by no other architect of his generation, and least of all by his fellow Viennese. It was Loos’s tragedy that a very large part of his employment before the First World War was in remodelling and redecorating flats; this constrained him so little, however, that many of these may easily be taken in photographs for completely original house interiors (Plate [155B]).
Although Loos began his career in the late nineties when the Art Nouveau tide ran highest, he was never at all affected by it, in part doubtless because he had spent the years 1893-6 in America beyond the range of Art Nouveau influence. The interior of the Goldman haberdashery shop in Vienna, which he designed in 1898, was entirely straight-lined and quite without any ornament; in the Café Museum of the next year the segmental ceiling and the bentwood chairs were curved, but only for structural reasons. Both are now gone, although the extant Knizé men’s shop in the Graben in Vienna of 1913 gives some idea of what the former was like.
It is Loos’s houses around Vienna, in Plzen, in Brno, in Montreux, and in Paris that place him as one of the four or five most important architects of his generation. His finest single extant work, however, is a small bar in Vienna. From the first he designed from the inside out, reducing his exteriors to square stucco boxes cut by many windows of different sizes and shapes. The results are very like Gill’s houses in California, as has been noted already, but with no such traditional elements as Gill’s arched porches. This is especially true of the Gustav Scheu house in the Larochegasse in the Vienna suburb of Hietzing, almost the only one left in Austria in something closely approaching its original condition (Plate [155A]; [Figure 43]). Loos was an enthusiastic admirer of English domestic architecture; this bent of his taste is curiously illustrated by his liking for English eighteenth-century furniture of the Queen Anne and Chippendale periods, which looks today so out of place in his severely rectangular rooms. But the architectural character of his interiors is never influenced by eighteenth-century modes, but only by the most advanced English work of the opening of the century which he knew well through the Studio. Articulated by plain wooden structural members like Voysey’s interiors or, on occasion, by similar piers clad with marble like Hoffmann’s in the Stoclet house, Loos’s suites of living areas are as flowing as Wright’s[[435]] but he never provided as much interconnexion between indoors and out.
Of a succession of houses built before the First World War the much mishandled Steiner house of 1910 and the above-mentioned Scheu house of 1912, both in suburbs of Vienna, are perhaps the finest. The Villa Karma, built much earlier at Montreux in Switzerland in 1904-6, had an almost Hoffmann-like sumptuousness of materials and finish within; but in the main Loos kept, like Voysey and Wright, to plainer effects and simple dark wooden trim.
Figure 43. Adolf Loos: Vienna, Gustav Scheu house, 1912, plan