FASHIONING VIENNA: ADOLF LOOS'S CULTURAL CRITICISM.

By Janet Stewart. London: Routledge. 2000. [pound]19.99

For an architect, Adolf Loos (1870-1933) was one of the most prolific, notorious and widely travelled cultural critics of his time. His epochal essay, 'Ornament and Crime' (1908), was an intellectual touchstone for many subsequent architects, including Le Corbusier, who, with unusual generosity, included a French translation in the second number of l'Esprit Nouveau. As in the case of Le Corbusier, literary discourse for Loos was a means of polemically advancing a range of cultural and architectural ideals. This kind of discourse often was and still is exaggerated, full of hyperbole, untenable contradictions and paradoxes. Janet Stewart, a lecturer in German at the University of Aberdeen, has undertaken a painstaking summary of Loos literary discourse.

Fashioning Vienna, is in itself a summary of her. The study of Loos's work has been the subject of numerous books and hundreds of essays. Stewart's contribution comes late and omits his architecture. Her main interest lies in revealing the paradox in Loos's critique of Austrian culture. The more fundamental paradox between Loos's literary output and his architecture is not recognized. It was not Stewart's intention. And it is alas an obvious shortcoming of such pure literary analyses. For had Stewart addressed this aspect, her thesis would have been relativized as being less a problem, but more a constant source of productive friction confronting any thinking architect.

As such, Stewart's book is an academic version of a Loos Reader's Digest. Hovering in the background of Stewart's summary is an eighteenth-century ideal of the homogeneity of an intellectual position, of a philosophical Gesamtkunstwerk, never made explicit as to how that might have been constituted in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Stewart operates on the one hand with the idealized monolith of modernism that was mythopoetized after its formation and on the other hand with the intellectual ideals of the eighteenth century, in itself a paradoxical, but not untypical position for a literary critic. Stewart, who also teaches Cultural History, would certainly benefit from widening her scope.