Adolf Loos: The Art of Architecture by Masheck Joseph

Author:Masheck, Joseph [Masheck, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780857733214
Publisher: I.B.Tauris
Published: 2013-03-21T00:00:00+00:00

But I want to adduce at this point something rather more than just another art-historical detail: a wall of marble paneling, or interior cladding, with intarsia in one of the side-aisles, of the great Byzantine church of Hagia Sophia, in Istanbul. Loos himself was proud to have done intarsia work, as a young man in America (though I believe, with wood). Here the lintel-like upper tablet and the handling of the fluting are the obviously similar features. So flat a translation of columnar tectonics into a compartmentalization of the surface seems in quite the spirit of Riegl, who would have called the Byzantine example ‘East Roman,’ and who conveyed such a modern sense of the breakdown and sublimation of bulk into surface pattern in ‘Late Roman’ art. What a fine instance, too, of Loos’s love of naturally figured polished granite and marble as a mode of ornamentation, at once materialistic and moved by innate beauty – “Fine material is God’s own wonder,” as he interjects with absolutely unironic passion in 1917 (in ‘Hands Off!’), having first declared more school-masterishly, “One should remember that quality materials and good workmanship do not simply make up for a lack of ornamentation, they far surpass it in luxuriousness” (OC 182).

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