Steiner house, which was designed for the painter Lilly Steiner and her husband Hugo, was built in Vienna in 1910. It is one of Adolf Loos’s most significant and well-known work. Being celebrated as the epitome of a modern home, Steiner House has an advanced modernity of form, acting as a transition from classical to modern architecture. It also represents the anticipation and manifesto of Rationalism which refers to the ideology of symmetry, functionality, geometric shapes of form, and use of highly industrialized materials.
The surface is pure, smooth, white and without ornament. Instead of using ornaments, Loos thought that keeping the original features of materials could display purity and modernism.
Loos frequently used a volumetric palate of simple forms including cubes, rectangular boxes and cylinders. The dominant volume of Steiner House is a massive rectangular box. Due to the local height limitations, Loos could only build one floor above street level, so he employed a quarter-round steel roof for the front of the house and flat roof for the back. This method allowed the house to have an addition of one more floor. Moreover, the flat roof is an important element of modern architecture and Loos considered it as “the greatest architectural invention since the beginning of time.”
The two sides of the building applied different types of roof, producing vastly different feelings to the audience; the front side is more ceremonial and serious while the back side is more relaxing and energetic, thus creating an interesting and compelling contrast. The garden side , to which architecture historians have paid more attention, is perfectly symmetrical.
The interior space is compact and separated by different levels, but also connected in a system, making the house refined and intricate like a puzzle. The system sets up an order, making the living room connected to a terrace that has access to the garden. This kind of interior space arrangement is commonly used in today’s houses. This is an example of Raumplan that Adolf Loos created. It is about using the variation of level and ceiling heights to distinct functional requirements. Raumplan is considered as a spatial-temporal labyrinth because people inside can hardly figure out a whole image of the house and people’s movement are controlled by the space.
The Steiner house is one of Loos’s most significant and well known works. This house features straight lines, clean curves and each room is on a different level, with floors and ceilings set at different heights. The Steiner house is 32.8ft×32.8ft. The house is divided on four levels and arranged according to function, revealing Loos’s interest towards different levels of privacy within the domestic living space. The ground floor contains the huge comfortable space of the living room connected to the garden as well as the dining room, the music room and the library, all considered very important functions. On the other floors are the bedrooms, studios, kitchen, sewing room, servants’s area and pantry. Loos wraps these spaces with a panels of oak, the same material is used for the roof beams, which alternate with white plastered surfaces and face-work. The window openings are placed according to their functions within the interior Raumplan and their relations with the exterior. Loos house played an important role in establishing the reputation of Loos as a bold modern architect.
His project is client-specific and site-specific. He also attached importance to the atmosphere of the interior, creating a warm and relaxing space for the family. Steiner House is also a good example showing antitheses in architecture, including those between public and private, inside and outside, rational and irrational. The façade of it vigorously presents Adolf Loos’s theory: decoration is crime. Loos thought that simplicity is a higher level of civilization and freedom from ornament indicate spiritual strength. Adolf Loos recognized the timelessness of classicism, so Steiner House represents a harmony between “classic” and “modern”. He encouraged not to be limited by the traditional work but also, not to brush it away. Steiner House is ahead of its time, and thus it has brought numerous new ideas and contributions to the field of architecture.
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Steiner House by Adolf Loos | Architecture Enthusiast |
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Cylinder Nine by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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