The Third Dimension in the Drawings of Adolf Loos

Adolf Loos is probably the twentieth-century architect whose works have been most represented graphically by others to make known and disseminate his work, whose projects have been repeatedly drawn, and whose buildings, most notably his residential buildings, have been most modelled and analysed. Three-dimensional drawings predominate and are often axonometric, a particularly suitable medium to help us understand and explain the tight spatial sequences of Loos’s architecture. Very little research, however, has considered the drawings made by the architect himself in the design of his works. Did he use similar resources as a design mechanism? What systems of representation did he use? Determining the answers to these questions requires acceptance of Loos’s own views on drawing and a cautious approach to the limited collection of his surviving original drawings. The works in the collection of the Albertina Museum reveal a clear preference for two-dimensional representations of a project, with three-dimensional approaches used to supplement them, marginally even in the case of axonometric drawing. That runs contrary to the predominant use of axonometric projection in subsequent studies of the architect’s legacy.