The Looshaus Christopher Long

When it was completed in 1911, the Goldman & Salatsch Building in Vienna, commonly known as the Looshaus, incited controversy for its austerity and plainness. It represented a stark rejection of the contemporary preference for ornamentation, though its architect, Adolf Loos (1870-1933), had intended it to preserve Viennese tradition within a new modernist language. The heated debate that ensued among critics and the public set the project apart, distinguishing it as one of the most important and contentious buildings of the early 20th century.

In celebration of the Looshaus' centennial year, Christopher Long, a leading authority on Viennese architectural history, brings to light extensive new research and careful analysis that dispel long-held myths about Loos, his building, and its critical reception. The book, which features new colour photography and a vast array of archival materials in print for the first time, tells the remarkable story of the Looshaus' design and construction, the political and social restlessness it reflected, and the building's fundamental role in defining the look of modernism.

Christopher Long is professor and chair of history/theory at University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture. He is the author of Paul T. Frankl and Modern American Design (Yale).

"Steeped in detail of every kind, this book conveys an exhilaratingly rich tableau of the Viennese world within which Adolf Loos operated, and makes a very valuable contribution to the study of a building already widely acknowledged as among the most important early 20th-century additions to the architecture of Vienna, a key site in the evolution of early Modernism." -Elizabeth Clegg, author of Art, Design, and Architecture in Central Europe 1890-1920

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