Widely regarded as one of the most significant prophets of modern architecture, Adolf Loos was a “starchitect” in his own day. His work emblemitizes a great rift between the traditional architectural culture of the nineteenth century and the radical modernism of the twentieth.

His essay “Ornament and Crime,” equating superfluous ornament and “decorative arts” with underclass tattooing, is an an attempt to tell modern Europeans that they should know better. (That chapter, here, has been reprinted as the only essay not by the architect in the Pelican collection of Loos: Ornament and Crime: Thoughts on Design and Materials, 2019.) But negation of ornament was also supposed to reveal, not negate, good style: an incorrigible ironist has been taken too literally in denying architecture as fine art. Without normalizing his edgy radicality, Masheck argues that Loos's masterful "astylistic architecture" valued tradition as well as utility, and was not, as too many have thought, a mere repudiation of the more florid side of the Vienna Secession.

Loos believed in culture, comfort, intimacy and privacy, and advocated an evolution in artful architecture. Masheck reads him as a cleverly ironic rhetorician whose witticisms have too often been taken at face value. Far from being a nihilistic anti-architect, Masheck's Loos is “an unruly yet integrally canonical artist-architect.”

This has been described is a brilliantly written revisionist reading of a perennially popular architect.

London: I.B. Tauris (now Bloomsbury Academic), 2013

ISBN-10: 1780764235
ISBN-13: 9781780764238