Hugo Ehrlich and Villa Karma

Abstract

The authorship of the Villa Karma is as a rule ascribed to Adolf Loos. The villa was formed by taking an existing structure and extending it upwards and sideways, in the period between 1903 and 1906, according to most accounts. In fact, however, in this time the construction of the new parts and the transformation of the existing building had only just begun. The period in which the Zagreb architect Hugo Ehrlich was involved in the design and building of Karma stretched from 1908 to 1912; it was then that the villa took on its final external appearance. At the same time the grounds were landscaped, and the interior spaces were defined according to Ehrlich’s designs. The hall and the library are an exception, for Ehrlich produced them in line with Loos’s approach and in part with materials already sourced. An examination of the documentation kept in three countries has shown that the claim that Ehrlich was just the contractor for the building of designs previously defined by Loos is untenable. The original style can be correlated with a series of formal motifs in the works of Hugo Ehrlich or Viktor Kovačić at the time they were working together, which was contemporaneous with the period in which Karma was being finished. The most telling confirmation of the work of Ehrlich consists of several hundred drawings from Ehrlich’s personal papers.