Adolf Loos 150: lecture by Christopher Long

The third autumn lecture of the Pěstuj prostor association again thematizes the work of Adolf Loos and his collaborators. American art and architecture historian and professor at the University of Texas at Austin Christopher Long will explore how and why Loos changed his idea of Raumplan in the last years of his life and uncover new ways of understanding his unique spatial concept. The lecture in English with Czech subtitles will be streamed on Wednesday, November 11, 2020, at 6 PM in the Facebook event.

In the last three years of his life, after completing the Müller Villa in Prague in 1930, Adolf Loos worked on approximately a dozen other houses. Only a few of them were actually built; the others remain as projects, some complete, some in partial form. Loos worked on them with various Czech assistants; thus, the buildings have somewhat different forms and scales. All designs, however, show slight changes in Loos's conception of space. The mentioned houses are more open, have fewer "twists" and changes in direction, and offer more coherent views. Simplified, they are "more relaxed." Professor Long will focus on explaining the shift in Loos's late work in his lecture.

The final part of the Adolf Loos 150 series, prepared with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, the city of Plzeň, the Plzeň Region, the State Cultural Fund, and the Czech Architecture Foundation, will take place on Wednesday, November 25, 2020, at 6 PM again on the Facebook profile and YouTube channel of Pěstuj prostor. Maria Szadkowska, head of the Center for Modern Architecture Heritage of the Museum of the Capital City of Prague, will present in her lecture titled Adolf Loos – Repetition of Genius the architectural legacy of Adolf Loos and the principles of his work.

Prof. Christopher Long, Ph.D. studied at universities in Graz, Munich, and Vienna, earning his doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin in 1993. He taught at the Central European University in Prague from 1994 to 1995. He focuses on the history of modern architecture, with a particular emphasis on Central Europe from 1880 to the present. Trained more in history than in architecture, he adopts approaches from cultural and intellectual history as well as political and economic history. He has studied issues of cultural representation in architecture, broader ideological contexts of architectural theory from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the development of architectural education. Professor Long's interests also include modern design in Austria, the Czech lands, and the United States. He has worked on several exhibitions and publishes on a wide range of topics.

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