Giving Voice to a Building: A Critical Analysis of Adolf Loos’s Landhaus Khuner

Abstract

In 1930 Adolf Loos completed two buildings: the (famous, urban) Muller House in Prague and the (not famous, rural) Landhaus Khuner in Payerbach, Lower Austria, some 90 kilometres from Vienna – two designs that could not be more different in appearance. While the Muller House is defined by the austere rectilinearity of its compact white cubic aesthetic, the Landhaus Khuner, being a country retreat designed for Paul Khuner and family as a vacation home, is almost rustic in its look with log-and-stone construction sheltered under a pitched roof and exterior colours ranging from grey and dark brown to green and red. Significantly, in the literature on Loos written after the Second World War the Muller House is hailed as a masterpiece, exemplary of the architect’s rejection of ornamentation, even the culmination of his oeuvre. Since then there has been a consistent flow of interest in the Prague house from the likes of Beatriz Colomina. Around the Landhaus Khuner, in contrast, there has developed only a sort of hush – maybe precisely because it differs so strongly from Loos’s other realised projects. Why this is the case, and why we should re-examine the Landhaus Khuner, forms the subject of this essay. What is argued is that we need to embrace a broader cultural understanding of Modernism, something proposed for instance in the concept of Critical Regionalism by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, yet which in practice requires even wider interpretations of the forces and counter-forces involved in the pursuit of inter-war Modernist architecture in countries such as Austria.