Villa Muller.

In Prague, one of Loos' seminal buildings has been rescued from neglect and obscurity and faithfully restored.

While many twentieth-century buildings evoke a strong emotional response, only a handful of small-scale works have the same effect. Within this category belongs Adolf Loos' Villa Muller in Prague.

Loos (1870-1933) was born in a province of the Czech Republic, in the Moravian capital of Brno, but lived most of his life in Vienna. He advocated architecture devoid of decoration. His houses were cubic designs with carved interiors, like intricate delicate sculptures, revealing complex three-dimensional relationships between inner volumes. They flowed one into another yet were self-contained enough to seem intimate and were finished in both natural and man-made materials. Loos insisted that 'rich materials and good workmanship should not only be considered as making up for lack of decoration, but as far surpassing it in sumptuousness. Noble materials are a gift from God'.

The villa was designed within a few weeks in 1928 and built in Prague 1929-30 for Frantisek Muller, an engineer and partner of a large construction firm, Kapsa & Muller. It stands on a steep slope overlooking surrounding villas and close to a main avenue to the city centre. At first sight it appears almost too simplistic, its exterior refusing to divulge interior splendour and fulfilling Loos' notion that 'the building should be dumb outside and only reveal wealth inside'.

Clad in bright green glass tiles, the entrance lobby leads to a restful white panelled ante room. A small staircase curves up to a large double-height main hall running the width of the villa with a door and windows onto a terrace overlooking the garden. Grey-green marble partly covers the walls, columns and horizontal surfaces. From here you can either continue upwards to a boudoir, rising half a storey and lined with yellow lemonwood, or to the dining room above the high drawing room. From the dining room, the route leads to a central stairwell illuminated by a skylight, and from there to the library, brightly lit in spite of being clad with dark mahogony panelling. The kitchen next to the service stair is on the same level as the dining room. On the floor above are bedrooms and dressing rooms, a child's playroom, bathrooms and maid's room; and above them at attic level is a summer breakfast room looking over a large terrace sheltered by extended flank walls. An opening in the right-hand wall frames a view of Prague Castle. The complexity of the spaces, interwoven yet with each maintaining functional identity, is perplexing but the spatial planning of the main rooms reproduces the Raumplan of the whole villa -- the dwelling within a dwelling.

In an interview after the villa's completion, Loos explained: 'My architecture is not conceived by drawings but by spaces. I do not draw plans, facades or sections ... For me, the ground floor, first floor, do not exist ... There are only interconnected continual spaces, rooms, halls, terraces ... Each space needs a different height: a dining room is obviously higher than a larder, that is why the ceilings are placed at different levels. These spaces are connected So that ascent and descent are not only unnoticeable, hut at the same time functional'. Of all his works, Loos considered that the Villa Muller was the best example of such spatial economy.

The Mullers lived in the villa through the Second World War and the 1948 Communist coup. Subsequently, the building was occupied by Communist authorities, used as a repository by Prague Museum and taken over by Marxist-Leninists. Finally, in 1995, it was bought by the city from the Muller family. Fortunately not one of the occupying institutions had attempted to alter the villa. Though neglected (and the garden left to go wild), it survived more or less intact. In October 1998, after a limited competition, a team led by Vaclav Girsa began to restore it with the help of the Loos scholar, Burkhardt Rukschcio.

The villa has been restored with care and scholarship. Exterior rendering has been replaced; original decoration has been left where possible and matched, and panelling cleaned. (Stripping back wallpaper and panelling to the core structure revealed Loos' pencil notes and sketches scribbled on walls.) Furniture by Chippendale and Loos, pictures by Kokoschka, Corot and Chittussi, a Rodin sculpture and Persian carpets have been retrieved from museums and reinstated. The garden has been replanted to the original design by Loos, Camillo Schneider and Karl Forster and enclosed with a turquose painted metal and wooden fence. The villa is now open to the public with some rooms being devoted to a permanent Loos exhibition and others used as a study centre.

1. House, south-east face.

2. Library.

3. North-east terrace and drawing room.

4. Main drawing room clad with grey-green marble.

5. Boudoir panelled in lemon wood.

6. Kitchen.

1. garage

2. servants' quarters 

3. services

4. drawing room

5. dining room

6. kitchen

7. library

8. boudoir

9. bedroom

10. dressing room

11. playroom

12. bathroom