Review: Learning to Dwell: Adolf Loos in the Czech Lands; The Restoration of the Villa Müller and Hirsch Apartment; Saving Loos: The Unknown Legacy of the British Architectural Library

Abstract

Learning to Dwell: Adolf Loos in the Lands; The Restoration of the Villa Muller and Hirsch Apartment; Saving Loos: The Unknown Legacy of the British Architectural Library . Royal Institute of British Architects, London. 24 February–3 May 2011 The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in London was host to three small exhibitions in the spring of 2011 relating to projects by Adolf Loos in what is now the Republic. The exhibitions originated in the City of Prague Museum, which purchased and restored Loos's Villa Muller in Prague (1928–30) between 1997 and 2000. Upon the conclusion of the meticulous restoration, the museum commissioned a team of scholars to undertake the ambitious project of tracing the physical and documentary remains of all of Loos's projects in the Czech lands. (This phrase encompasses the two historical phases in which Loos worked: before the First World War, when Moravia and Bohemia were crown lands within the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and between the wars, when they were part of Czechoslovakia.) Their findings were selectively presented in the largest of the RIBA exhibitions, Learning to Dwell , and published in full in the accompanying catalogue. Two smaller exhibitions, put on in partnership with the RIBA, documented the restoration of the Villa Muller, showed photographs of a Loos interior from Pilsen that has been restored and transplanted to Prague, and told the story of the preservation of the Adolf Loos Archive (now in the Graphische Sammlung …