Adolf Luce
Hi, dear friends who paint the world, I am your good friend Xiao Shu. Anyone who studied design knows that at the beginning of the 20th century, there was a Viennese who put forward a slogan "Decoration is evil", which immediately became one of the powerful slogans of modernist design. He was the pioneer of modernist architecture, the Austrian architect and architectural theorist Adolf Luce.
Adolf Luz was one of Austria's quite influential designers. He was born in Moravia, Brno, Czech Republic. From 1890 to 1893, After receiving a technical education at the Royal Imperial Technical College, Luce continued his studies at the Technical Institute in Dresden. He traveled to the United States in 1893, and during his three years in the United States, he became acquainted with the Chicago School, which had a great influence on him. In 1896 Luce returned to Vienna to work on interior design and wrote articles on various topics for the liberal Magazine of New Freedom, ranging from clothing to architecture, from etiquette to music. In 1908, Luce published Decoration and Sin, arguing that decoration was a cultural degradation, plus decoration was uneconomical and impractical, so decoration was unnecessary. The same thesis was proposed in 1900 in the form of an allegory of Anti-Integral Art. The representative work is the Steiner Residence, built in Vienna in 1910, which excludes all decorations that have nothing to do with function and leaves only plain wall windows, which can be said to have pioneered modernist design.
Miller Residences
From 1920 to 1922 Luce served as chief architect of the Vienna Housing Service, and in the plight of the war he applied the undeveloped "spatial design" to the problem of collective housing. In 1920 he designed an excellent and economical collective housing scheme, known for the Hay Hill community, with balcony dwellings integrated with greenhouses and allocated leases, and the owners could grow their favorite plants, which became a typical urban design strategy in the post-war period of inflation and became a common policy in German collective residential areas in the 1920s.
Moller House, facade along the street
Adolf Luce was one of the greatest architects of the twentieth century. However, in China, people's understanding of his works and ideas often stops at "decoration is evil", which is in stark contrast to his important position in the international architectural world, which cannot but be said to be a very regrettable thing. He advocated that architecture should be mainly practical and comfortable, believing that architecture "does not rely on decoration but on the beauty of the body itself", emphasizing the proportional relationship between the combination of buildings as cubes and walls and windows. One of Luce's greatest contributions to modern architecture, the idea of "spatial mass design", promoted the transformation of modern architectural discourse from "volume" and "decoration" to "space". As a methodological principle of architectural design, it not only includes Luce's thinking on the architecture itself, but also closely related to Luce's thinking on culture, society, art, history, tradition and other issues.
Today's sharing is coming to an end here, thank you for listening to you, for more institutional information, please pay attention to the WeChat public account: Painting the World Examination and Research Institute. I'm Xiao Shu and we'll see you next time!