Adolf Loos

Loos had written his intentions in a short brochure that accompanied his plans. He explained his desire to create a building that, seen only once, it would impress itself indelibly on the individual memory as the symbol of Chicago, in the way that St.Peter's incarnates Rome, and the leaning tower, Pisa. He recognized that it would be futile to hope to attain this objective when competing with skyscrapers of exceptional originality, already inscribed in history, or to reproduce a typical American building on which none would remark. Conversely, to adopt radical new forms that denied tradition--as did the proposals by several German, Austrian, and French architects--was to go against the mandate of the competition committee. Styles is non-traditional architecture were changing as frequently as women's hats, and the financial partners of the Tribune would not want to have made the mistake of choosing an avant-garde approach, only to discover that their once fashionable building had become dated the following year. Loos, in presenting his column building, argued for the use of historical precedent:"the model of the column liberated from its function, of the gigantic column, is given to us by tradition: the column of Trajan was the model for the column of Napoleon in the Place Vendome." The triumphal column of the Roman emperor had symbolized the growth and power of the Roman empire and Loos's proposal could express the same for the Tribune. Additionally, the single column was an object that, since the Renaissance, had continually intrigued architects. Superb columns were represented in all architectural treatises that had been inspired by Vitruvius's ten Books. Parted from practical functions and freed from load-bearing purposes, the column could affirm and assert its formal purity.

Finally, in the name of a rationalist, cultural tradition Loos criticized ornament. He was opposed to the fleeting nature of successive “revivals” in the second half of the nineteenth century, and imputed them with the same ephemeral and superfluous character of the ornamental works fo the Secession. On the other hand, he admired the atemporality of the classical language. For him, the persistance of the same formal typology from the Renaissance to the neoclassicism of the beginning of the nineteenth century was not a revival but a tradition, and relied on forms that had resisted the fluctuations of fashion and that reflected, consequently, a deep and durable modernity. Forcing the terms a little, one could say that, for Loos, western classicism revealed less a culture than a nature: it is in the natural environment where western man moves and recognizes himself. Classical architecture did not bring about ornament; its traits were simple and universal enough to encompass Ancient Greek and Roman as well as the Renaissance, Palladio and Schinkel. This rational classicism nourished in Loos, as we will see, a great sensitivity to the essentials that went far beyond signifiers. Certain historians have given a name to this tendency: they call it “modern classicism.”

Loos always situated himself dialectically to the historic continuity of tradition: he took care to speak of concrete time and space, he opposed the quest for new froms as a refute of history, and more importantly, he criticized the privileged status of the architect as creator and genius.