Acknowledging Black History Month, this talk features a discussion of the houses Adolf Loos designed for Alessandro Moissi, Tristan Tzara/Greta Knutson, and Josephine Baker.
Acknowledging Black History Month, this talk features a discussion of the houses Adolf Loos designed for Alessandro Moissi, Tristan Tzara/Greta Knutson, and Josephine Baker.The title of the talk is a play on the title of a book by Colin St John Wilson (which drew on the scholarship of people like Peter Blundell Jones), and Adolf Loos’ short-lived magazine ‘The Other’. Peter Blundell Jones and Colin St. John Wilson both referred to ‘an alternative Modern Architecture, sometimes called the organic tradition incorporating work by what might be termed neo-expressionist architects such as Hans Scharoun and Hugo Häring. This was an architecture of functional specificity and ‘the free angle’ as opposed to the universalism and tyranny of the 90 degrees that characterised the canonical International Style (with Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye as its standard bearer). This talk is about yet another alternative tradition of Modern Architecture, one lived as opposed to canonised (or counter-canonised). One founded on a specificity that goes beyond the functional because it was projected for a clientele who were not able to take their own ‘being’ for granted, a clientele that during the interwar modernist period was almost exclusively catered for by Adolf Loos.
Michael Badu is an architect and writer, teaching at Kingston University. His SAHGB funded PhD, The Avant-Garde and Black Subjectivity in the Making of Progressive Practice, is on Adolf Loos' design for the Tzara House.
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