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Architecture and Crime: Adolf Loos and the Culture of the "Case"

Research imperatives and process: This article proposes a reconsideration of the textual and architectural production of Adolf Loos. Starting out from the architect's notoriously controversial built works and polemical writings, Schwartz argues that both buildings and texts show a consistent and self-conscious set of strategies for creating a place for the public debate of matters of social and aesthetic importance at the time of a deteriorating public sphere in the Habermasian sense. In particular, the architect's repeated invocation of crime shows that he articulated social and architectural concerns by means of sophisticated publicistic strategies that mobilised the space between the press and the criminal courts, an area where he had experience in his own involvement in criminal trials. Based on extensive archival, as well as theoretical research, the article attempts to develop concepts for understanding the relation between artistic work and the historical specificities of the public sphere.