Adolf Loos Quotations

Changes in the traditional way of building are only permitted if they are an improvement. Otherwise stay with what is traditional, for truth, even if it be hundreds of years old has a stronger inner bond with us than the lie that walks by our side.

The house has to please everyone, contrary to the work of art which does not. The work is a private matter for the artist. The house is not.

The work of art shows people new directions and thinks of the future. The house thinks of the present.

The law courts must appear as a threatening gesture toward secret vice. The bank must declare: here your money is secure and well looked after by honest people.

Does it follow that the house has nothing in common with art and is architecture not to be included in the arts? Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else that fulfils a function is to be excluded from the domain of art.

The house has to serve comfort. The work of art is revolutionary; the house is conservative.

The room has to be comfortable; the house has to look habitable.

The work of art is brought into the world without there being a need for it. The house satisfies a requirement. The work of art is responsible to none; the house is responsible to everyone. The work of art wants to draw people out of their state of comfort.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century we abandoned tradition, it's at that point that I intend to renew it because the present is built on the past just as the past was built on the times that went before it.

Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect's task therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise.

Man loves everything that satisfies his comfort. He hates everything that wants to draw him out of his acquired and secured position and that disturbs him. Thus he loves the house and hates art.

It does not do to use it with forms whose origin is intimately bound up with a specific material simply because no technical difficulties stand in the way.

The Potemkin city of which I wish to speak here is none other than our dear Vienna herself.

The architect can only achieve this if he establishes a relationship with those buildings which have hitherto created this sentiment in man.

Supply and demand regulate architectural form.

Tattooed men who are not behind bars are either latent criminals or degenerate aristocrats. If someone who is tattooed dies in freedom, then he does so a few years before he would have committed murder.

All art is erotic. The first ornament to have been invented, the cross, was of erotic origin. It was the first work of art. A horizontal stroke: the woman lying down. A vertical stroke: the male who penetrates her.

If nothing were left of an extinct race but a single button, I would be able to infer, form the shape of that button, how these people dressed, built their houses, how they lived, what was their religion, their art, their mentality.

I have emerged victorious from my thirty years of struggle. I have freed mankind from superfluous ornament.

Be truthful. Nature only sides with truth.

Lack of ornamentation is a sign of spiritual strength.

Be not afraid of being called un-fashionable.