Loos and Schinkel: The Metropolis, the Individual and the Collective

Historians and critics of Adolf Loos have repeatedly noted the influence that Karl Friedrich Schinkel had on the Austrian architect and, indeed, Loos himself made a direct reference to the importance of the German architect for the development of contemporary architecture and education. Rather than focussing on Loos’s relation to Schinkel through a systematic analysis of projects, this book places the relation between the two master architects within a larger-frame comparative approach. It makes a parallel examination of Schinkel and Loos’s strategies in regard to the metropolis or Großstadt. Referring to theories of Pier Vittorio Aureli and Camillo Sitte, Schmarsow and Merleau’s Ponty, sets the two architects within their urban context - in Schinkel’s case, it is a city on the verge on becoming the industrial metropolis; in the case of Loos, it is the fin-de-siecle world metropolis marked by Wagner, Kokoshska, and Freud. The book is divided into two sections, each consisting of two essays about Schinkel and two essays about Loos. The first section examines their concern for the city at large and their views on the Baroque and the classical and their ideas for the transformations of the modern, bourgeois city. The second section of the book analyses Schinkel’s and Loos’s works in light of the traditional conflict between the individual and the collective that characterize the large city and the metropolis in particular.