Adolf Loos lived through a particularly eventful and decisive period in modern European history. He was born in the year that saw the end of the Franco-Prussian War, with the defeat of the French Empire, and died in 1933, the year the Nazis came to power. Both events would have a decisive impact on the cultural life of the continent, and especially on that of the Central European countries. In between, there were the ravages of World War I and the redefinition of the political map.

Loos observed the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with the detachment afforded him by his status as a detractor not so much of the political regime as of the sociocultural model promoted by the Habsburg court. For this reason, since his return from America in 1896, his critical faculties were at the service of an idea of regenerating the customs and traditions of what some have called the decadent “fin-de-siècle Vienna”...[+]