LOOS - PILSEN - CONNECTIONS. Places, People, Events - Loos' work for Pilsen in context

24/1/2012

The exhibition in Exhibition Hall "13" presents the apartment interiors in Pilsen created by Adolf Loos and explains the circumstances under which they came into being. The exhibition lasts until 12 February 2012. Open daily except Mondays, 10 a.m. - 6 p.m.

The topic of Loos’ activities in Pilsen has been frequently mentioned in foreign as well as Czech literature. However, what has not been emphasised enough so far is the fact that Pilsen, together with Vienna, cumulates the greatest number of Loos’ works and that even Loos’ most significant project, the Villa Müller in Prague , came into being through the ‘medium’ of Pilsen.

A few decades later many researchers, who assembled a substantial amount of information about the topic, concerned themselves with Loos’ work. Nevertheless, their interest often veered towards Loos’ work itself, whilst its contexts lay outside the focus of their attention. The aim of this exhibition is not only to summarise previously known information but also to clarify and evolve this information in terms of the new findings acquired by the pursuit in field and in the archives in Pilsen. The publication intends to contribute to Loos’ work in Pilsen no longer being perceived as a skewed, abnormal issue, which somehow accidentally emerged there in two periods but, on the contrary, for it to be logically integrated into the social and cultural history of the city as well as into the lives of its inhabitants, which is where it belongs. What is, however, becoming more and more apparent is the fact that the emergence of the housing interiors modified by Loos was a natural part of the process of modernisation of the flats belonging to influential clientele in Pilsen. Many other architects also took part in this process.

The setting of most of the flats belonging to this group of residents in proximity to today’s Klatovy Avenue (Klatovská třída) was connected with the fact that the avenue used to be the most remarkable boulevard of the city, around which the social life of Pilsen was concentrated. This avenue and its close surroundings provided access to all necessary services. Living close to Klatovy Avenue, whose tidiness was constantly improving at the time, also offered a higher quality of life due to the courtyards that were not built upon and thus were left empty for greenery. With regards to the fact that the surroundings of Klatovy Avenue in the centre and its proximity were pretty much entirely built-up as early as in the second half of the 19th century, the emergence of the new exquisite mansions of influential families consisted of the reconstruction of the already existing houses. In the case of the reconstruction of older houses, the convenience and comfort of most of the new flats, not only those designed by Loos, scarcely became evident from the outer view of the buildings. We can assume, due to the, at the time, existing respect for the monotonous historicist facades, that this could have been a deliberate endeavour of the wealthy group (primarily German speaking Jewish community) of residents to stay down-the-line with the working-class majority of the population. Loos’ concept of living averted inwards from the surrounding world into the intersections of the axes of the symmetrically designed interiors must have been entirely in compliance with such an endeavour.