Adolf Loos

Born in Brno in 1870 to stonemasons, Loos inherited his father's deafness and solitary nature after the elder man's death when the boy was nine. He drifted through colleges, then crossed to America, where Chicago's "form follows function" ethos rewired his thinking. Back in Vienna he wrote: The Story of a Poor Rich Man, a satire, then Ornament and Crime, the manifesto that declared decoration degeneracy and made his name. Looshaus rose in 1910, a stark face against the city's gilt, and his Raumplan method — a way of stacking interior volumes by use rather than symmetry — found fullest form in…