Notes from Adolf Loos: ‘Interior’
Adolf Loos prided himself on being an architect without a pencil.
He disrupted the representation of the house. He was critical and revolted against the practice of indicating dimensions in figures or measured drawings. He felt such a procedure ‘dehumanises design.’
‘If i want wood paneling..to be a certain heigh, I stand there, hold my hand at that certain height and the carpenter makes his pencil park. Then I step back and look at it from one point and from another, visulising the finished result with all my powers. This is the only human way to decide on the height or wainscot, or on the width of a window.’
…or, perhaps, the location of cooking and storage units, their arrangement determined through use over time and experience with the real thing, something that can never be represented in drawings.
‘In architecture,’ Loos writes, ‘The mark of a building which is truly established is that is remains ineffective in two dimesnions.’
Loos was inclned to use a minimum of paper plans; he carried in his head all the details.
The principle of disruptve technology is that these details are not the sole vision of one person, but a collaborative creation.
Disruptive Thoughts 