Loos's Müller Villa

2009

The Müller Villa in Střešovice, completed 1930. Adolf Loos's Raumplan made flesh: a plain white box outside, a precisely choreographed cascade of rooms inside. Place: Nad hradním vodojemem 14, Střešovice Figures: Adolf Loos, architect (Brno-born, Vienna-trained) · Karel Lhota, co-architect · František Müller, engineer · Milada Müllerová Adolf Loos, 59, his health failing after cancer surgery a decade earlier and nearly deaf; he has spent forty years arguing that ornament is crime and that the inside of a building is not the outside. František Müller, partner in the Prague construction firm Kapsa & Müller (which will build the villa with its own labor), commissions a house in Střešovice in 1928. Loos works from Vienna by correspondence; his Czech collaborator Karel Lhota handles the site. Permission is denied by the city building office three times for being too austere. Construction begins in October 1929 and finishes in summer 1930. From the street the villa is a white cube with a few asymmetrical windows. The street facade gives nothing. Das Haus sei nach außen verschwiegen, im Inneren offenbare es seinen ganzen Reichtum, Loos has written: the house should be silent outside and reveal its full wealth within. The subject dates from 1930; this photograph was taken in 2009.