Fashioning Vienna: Adolf Loos's Cultural Criticism - Hardcover

Stewart, Janet

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0415221765 ISBN 13: 9780415221764

Publisher: Routledge, 2000

Synopsis

This book seeks, through an examination of the form and content of his texts, to extend our understanding of Adolf Loos and his role in the struggle to define the nature of modernity in Vienna at the turn of the nineteenth century. It makes extensive use of primary sources including archive material and newspaper reports, which serve to shed new light on the way in which Loos's writings are embedded in their socio-cultural context. Drawing on insights from German and Austrian studies, sociology and cultural history, this book offers a genuinely interdisciplinary approach to a figure who himself operated in an interdisciplinary fashion.

About this title

Review:

While Adolf Loos is well known as one of the key representatives of early modernist architectures, holding his own next to such figures as Louis Sullivan, Frank lloyd Wright and Otto Wagner, a wider public does not yet know the scope of his work and writings. Janet Stewart's fascinating new study fianlly provides a corrective to this limited and specialized reception of Loos.
–Modernism/Modernity

Stewarts book marks a departure from previous exploratons of Loo's writings... Stewart offers a remarkably lucid, nuanced and often perceptive account of Loo's texts and their cultural frame. Her meticulously crafted analysis operates, she tells us, through the parallel processes of decosntruction, assemblage and reconstruction. ... This method works very well in documenting the oppositions that underlie much of Loo's thought....perhaps the most complete and sharply drawn picture to date in English of Loos as cultural critic.
–Harvard Design Magazine

A thorough and engaging book....Stewart's book is an important and welcome contribution to the scholarly literature on Loos, for it is the first comprehensive study of his texts that seriously attempts to account for their contradictory and paradoxical nature in a positive manner....Stewart's book provides rich material for understanding Loos's cultural criticism and should inspire further work on how such criticism relates to his architecture and to other fields for which modernity and modernism are important yet problematic concepts.
–Centropa: A Journal of Central European Art and Architecture

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0415221765
• ISBN 13: 9780415221764
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 236