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Lively, snapshot-like vignettes form an intimate, literary portrait of the infamously eccentric and influential modern architect Adolf Loos.
List of contents
Editor’s Introductory Notes
Preface: Reflections of a Female Protege
Adolf Loos: A Short Biography
Claire Beck Loos: The Fractured Lens
Introduction to The Private Adolf Loos
Foreword by Claire Beck Loos
The Private Adolf Loos
Appendices
Adolf Loos’ Circle, Some Context
Key to Names
Errata
Love Letters from Adolf Loos to Claire Beck
Photographs
Select Writings By Adolf Loos
Pottery
In Praise of the Present
Beethoven’s Ears
Ornament and Education
Short Hair: Short or Long—Masculine or Feminine?
Oskar Kokoschka
Acknowledgments
About the author
Claire Beck Loos (November 4, 1904 – January 15, 1942*) was a Czechoslovakian photographer and writer. She was the third wife of early modernist Czechoslovak-Austrian architect Adolf Loos. She worked in the atelier of Hede Pollak in Prague and studied photography in Vienna at the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt. In 1936, she published Adolf Loos Privat, a literary work of anecdotes about her ex-husband's character, habits, and sayings. Published by the Johannes-Presse in Vienna, the book was intended to raise funds for Adolf Loos's tomb, as he had died destitute three years earlier. She moved to Prague at the beginning of World War II and was deported to Theresienstadt at the end of 1941 and from there to Riga, Latvia, where she was killed in the Holocaust. *Her death date is thus only an estimate.
Summary
Lively, snapshot-like vignettes form an intimate, literary portrait of the infamously eccentric and influential modern architect Adolf Loos.
Written by Loos’ third wife, the photographer Claire Beck (1904–1942), these often humorous, short episodes reveal Loos’ temperament and philosophy during the last years of his life (1928–1933). His irreverent personality and attitudes about post-Imperial Viennese society, the role of the craftsman, and the organic beauty of raw materials are brought to light. Included in The Private Adolf Loos are Claire's photographs of Loos, collected in museums, as well as informal snapshots of the two of them showing the whimsy and theatricality of this relationship between two artistic personalities—one as infamous as he was well-regarded, and one, a youthful accomplice and budding photographer who would also become Loos' intermediary, secretary and proxy. With this bricolage of short tales and its dark conclusion at the brink of death’s door, Claire shows herself to be one of Loos’ great champions and memorialists, despite his shortcoming and debilitations. This is not a book just about architecture, but rather a love story about the Modern revolution that provides a woman’s insight into one of its most radical personalities, set amid the fascinating cultural backdrop of 1920s and 1930s interwar Europe.
Foreword
• Publicity campaign to include national magazines (Harper’s, New Yorker); art and architecture websites (Architecture Magazine, Riot Material, Hyperallergic, Art Margins, Artillery, Artforum, BOMB), and culture blogs interested in: modernism and open plan homes (Modernism Magazine), women artists and photographers (Bust, Bustle), travel/architecture tourism, Vienna, Prague; academic journals (Journal of Austrian Studies, West 86th)
• Pursuing second serial excerpts
• Goodreads giveaways
• Specialized academic marketing to architecture schools and universities with architecture programs
• Social media campaign using publicly available images of Loos’ buildings and interiors as well as photos from the book
Additional text
Adolf Loos, the Czechoslovak-Viennese theorist and architect, is widely thought to be 20th-century architecture’s most controversial figure. His scathing jeremiads on hypocrisy and ornament have generated their own torrent of interpretations, only to prove the enduring fecundity of his ideas. Claire wrote [Adolf Loos Privat] — first published in 1936 — to raise money for the tombstone Loos designed for himself. The book is so very alive with his presence, however, that surely it was a means to keep him close to her. […] In razor-sharp anecdotes, some a paragraph, some several pages, Claire writes in the present tense. The result is altogether Loosian: timeless, with as little ornament, but as much empathy, as any protégé could deliver. Here, theory in the flesh walks in.
—Barbara Lamprecht, coauthor of Neutra, Complete Works, book review for the Society of Architectural Historians
