La contradicción como protección frente a la sociedad
La arquitectura de Loos no responde a una voluntad de reelaboración lingüística constante, a la manera en que las vanguardias operaron la ruptura con la estética precedente. Antes bien, es un proceso lento de reflexión y puesta en práctica que le lleva, como final de un largo itinerario proyectual, a crear formas plásticas que tan pronto se acercan como se alejan de aquellas otras icónicas de la arquitectura moderna. Encontramos puntos tangenciales de contacto en las fachadas blancas y mudas de Oud, Gropius o el primer Le Corbusier... pero no responden a una voluntad de militancia en lo moderno³, puesto que cuando la arquitectura moderna da un giro hacia la transparencia, siguiendo la estela profética del ensayo Glasarchitektur de Paul Scheerbart, Loos mantiene su postura de continuar un proceso racional de proyectar según unas reglas propias, que acaban distanciándolo de las arquitecturas weimarianas de Taut, Gropius, Mies y tantos otros. Cuando los arquitectos más aventajados revestían de vidrio sus casas, desdibujando los límites entre interior y exterior, Loos interponía muros cada vez más opacos e inexpresivos entre la ciudad y el hogar. Ambas posturas compartían un sistema proyectual que partía del interior y acababa manifestándose en el exterior, concediendo una mayor importancia al interior e invirtiendo el proceso académico de composición⁴. Pero mientras los primeros pretendían potenciar la transparencia con cerramientos ligeros, generando un flujo espacial centrífugo, Loos sólo expresaba al exterior la existencia de un complejo interior a través de huecos asimétricamente dispuestos. Concebía arquitecturas centrípetas en las que la verdadera esencia se descubría a fuerza de penetrar en un interior recóndito. Para entender a Loos hay que entender su tiempo, el cambio de siglo, y su ciudad, Viena. Se trata de una época crucial en centro Europa, donde están cayendo las estructuras sociales del Antiguo Régimen aristocrático, y los jóvenes descendientes de la burguesía industrial que ha posibilitado tal cambio intentan encontrar su identidad en la confrontación directa con la estética de la generación anterior⁵. Es el tiempo del Art Nouveau y sus derivaciones nacionales: modernisme, liberty, jugendstyl, sezession... que como vemos se tratará siempre de movimientos en donde el carácter de novedad, juventud o libertad impregnan incluso el propio nombre-slogan. Los jóvenes burgueses acudían a arquitectos de prestigio para que diseñaran su casa, la decoración interior, y hasta la ropa que debían llevar para no desentonar con el ambiente, lo cual llevó a Loos a satirizar esta conducta en su artículo "De un pobre hombre rico",donde relata el exceso de celo estético que sufrían los arquitectos de la Sezession: "[...] a poco llegó el arquitecto para comprobar que todo estaba en orden y para dar respuesta a cuestiones difíciles. Entró en la habitación. El dueño le salió contento al encuentro pues tenía muchas preguntas que formular. Pero el arquitecto no advirtió la alegría del dueño. Había descubierto algo muy distinto y palideció: -Pero, ¡qué zapatillas lleva usted puestas!, exclamó con voz penosa. El dueño miró su calzado bordado. Pero respiró aliviado. Esta vez se sentía totalmente inocente. Las zapatillas habían sido confeccionadas fielmente de acuerdo con el diseño original del arquitecto. Por ello replicó con aire de superioridad: -¡Pero, señor arquitecto, ¿lo ha olvidado? Las zapatillas las ha diseñado usted mismo! -¡Ciertamente!,-tronó el arquitecto-, pero para el dormitorio. Usted está estropeando todo el ambiente con esas dos horribles manchas de color. ¿No se da usted cuenta? El dueño de la casa lo vio inmediatamente. Se quitó rápidamente las zapatillas y se alegró tremendamente de que el arquitecto no encontrara imposibles también sus calcetines. Se dirigieron al dormitorio donde el hombre rico pudo volverse a calzar las zapatillas" ⁶. La moraleja es inmediata: cada cual debe poder hacer lo que le plazca en el interior de su casa, sin estar sometido a la presión estética de la sociedad. Por eso Adolf Loos protege a los habitantes de sus viviendas con cerramientos opacos, inexpresivos y abstractos, para responder al despliegue de fatua ornamentación que había proliferado a lo largo de la Ringstrasse durante el siglo XIX con alardes neobarrocos y se desplegaba entonces por toda la ciudad con los diseños sezessionistas, para acentuar la sensación de extrañamiento del transeúnte o del ciudadano, para ocultar la vida privada de sus inquilinos de las miradas curiosas de la gente, para que cada cual pudiera decorar su casa con libertad.

De ahí que los muros de cerramiento en la arquitectura de Loos cumplan una doble función: por una parte protegen al habitante del exterior y por otra sirven de soporte para la expresión del mal gusto subjetivo de cada cual en el interior⁷. Es decir, son barreras físicas y psicológicas. Para Loos la casa es un templo del habitar, un lugar sagrado que hay que proteger de intrusos y miradas ajenas con el fin de poder desarrollar en su interior una vida libre y sin ataduras respecto a los demás. El propio Loos lo dejaba claro cuando decía: "La casa no debe expresar nada al exterior. Toda su riqueza debe manifestarse en su interior" ⁸.

Algo similar ocurre en el segundo ámbito de la vivienda en donde se desarrolla el Raumplan. Si cogemos desde el salón la escalera de la izquierda llegaremos a las salas privadas de los señores Müller, que se divide en dos zonas claramente diferenciadas: el saloncito o sala de conversación, bien iluminado y revestido de madera satinada clara, y tres escalones por encima la biblioteca, más recogida y por ello de menor altura, revestida de oscuros paneles de caoba. Como vemos el empleo de materiales cuidadosamente seleccionados por su color y textura, refuerza el carácter de privacidad de las estancias, puesto que se concibe cada zona de la casa en función de la sensación que se pretende conseguir: "[...] el artista, el arquitecto, siente primero el efecto que quiere alcanzar y ve después, con su ojo espiritual, los espacios que quiere crear. El efecto que quiere crear sobre el espectador, sea sólo miedo o espanto como en la cárcel; temor de Dios como en la iglesia; respeto del poder del Estado como en el palacio; piedad como ante un monumento funerario; sensación de comodidad como en casa; alegría como en una taberna; ese efecto viene dado por los materiales y por la forma" ⁹.
E indiscutiblemente, me atrevo a apostillar, por el color.

Contradiction as protection against society
Loos' architecture did not spring from a desire to reinvent language constantly, the modus operandi by which the avantgardes broke with the preceding aesthetics. Rather, it was a lengthy design process, a slow succession of reflecting and putting into practice, that finally led him to the creation of plastic forms which one moment are near to those of other icons of modern architecture and the next moment far from them. There are tangential points of contact in the mute, white façades of Oud, Gropius or early Le Corbusier, but this is not because Loos had any desire to be a militant modernist³: when modern architecture turned to transparency, following the prophetic trail blazed by Paul Scheerbart's article on Glasarchitektur, Loos stood fast and continued a rational process, designing according to his own rules, which eventually distanced him from the weimarian architecture of Taut, Gropius, Mies and many others. While the foremost architects were covering their houses in glass, blurring the boundaries between inside and outside, Loos was placing increasingly opaque and expressionless walls between the home and the city. Both stances shared a design system that was rooted in the interior and eventually manifested itself on the exterior; they considered the interior more important, thus inverting the academic composition procedure⁴. But while the others wanted to enhance transparency with light envelopes and generate a centrifugal spatial flow, Loos' only exterior expression of the existence of a complex interior are the asymmetric openings. He conceived centripetal architectures where the true essence is discovered by penetrating the depths of the interior.

In order to understand Loos one must understand his age, the turn of the century, and his city, Vienna. This was a crucial period in central Europe. The social structures of the aristocratic Ancien Régime were breaking down and the young scions of the industrial bourgeoisie that had made this change possible were attempting to define their identity through direct confrontation with the aesthetics of the previous generation⁵. It was the time of Art Nouveau and its national offshoots: modernisme, stile liberty, jugendstil, sezession ... in all these movements the notion of novelty, youth or liberty imbues even their name or slogan. The youth of the bourgeoisie commissioned well-known architects to design their houses, their interior decoration, even the clothes they should wear to fit in with their setting. Loos caricatured their behaviour in his "Poor Little Rich Man", where he recounts the excessive aesthetic zeal of the Sezession architects: “[...] soon afterwards the architect arrived to check that everything was in order and answer any difficult questions. He entered the room. The owner went happily to greet him, as he had many questions to ask. However, the architect did not notice the owner's happiness. He had seen something quite different and blanched. "What are those slippers you are wearing!" he exclaimed in a pained tone of voice. The owner looked at his embroidered slippers and breathed a sigh of relief. This time he was completely innocent: the slippers were a faithful copy of the architect's original design . So he answered with a superior air: "But Herr Architect, have you forgotten?" You yourself designed these slippers!" "Certainly!", thundered the architect, "but for the bedroom! You are ruining the whole atmosphere with those two horrible splashes of colour. Do you not realise?" The owner of the house saw it immediately, quickly took off his slippers and was tremendously glad that the architect did not find his socks impossible as well. They went to the bedroom, where the rich man was able to put his slippers back on” ⁶. The moral is obvious: people may do as they wish inside their own home without being subjected to the aesthetic pressures of society. That is why Adolf Loos protects the inhabitants of his houses with opaque, expressionless, abstract envelopes: to combat the display of fatuous ornamentation that had proliferated with neo-baroque ostentation all along the Ringstrasse in the 19th century and was spreading throughout the city at that time with the sezessionists' designs, to protect his occupants from prying eyes and to allow each and everyone to decorate their houses as they wished.

Consequently, the outer walls in Loos' architecture fulfil two functions: firstly, to protect the inhabitants from the exterior and, secondly, to provide a background for each person's expression of subjective bad taste in the interior⁷. In other words, they are physical and psychological barriers. For Loos, the house is a temple of habitation, a sacred place that must be protected from intruders and peeping eyes so that a free life, unfettered by others, can be lived inside it. Loos himself made this quite clear when he said: "The building should be dumb on the outside and reveal its wealth only on the inside" ⁸.

Colour and materials
His two most mature works, the Moller house in Viena and the Müller house in Prague, provide the best example of the contradiction between aseptic exteriors and colourful interiors. In the Moller house the façades are radically at odds with each other, incomprehensible unless analysed in terms of the poetics of otherness. For the same reason, the white, colourless expanses of the façade contrast with the colourful interiors with their great wealth of materials. The façades are given a more or less abstract character depending on the degree of public visibility. The street-facing façade is a large, white, dumb expanse while the back, facing onto the garden and only visible from inside the block, is absolutely conventional, almost trivial. I believe that the poetics of contradiction are no such thing, as the final result springs from a powerful, coherent body of theory. There may be a formal contradiction between the façades but there is none in the design method. We may or may not agree with it but the presence of a theoretical framework to support it is undeniable.

The case of the Müller house is the most paradigmatic as it is the culmination of the long road that began at the Rufer house. Here, both the schizophrenia of the wall - white outside and coloured inside - and the volumes of the interior reach a peak of complexity and refinement. The four sides are all equally abstract because all of them are visible from the street, from different angles. Continuing the coherency of his design, he moves the abstract barriers of the house onto all its faces and pours all the psychological and emotional content into the spatial articulation and coverings of the interiors, thus reinforcing the separation between the public exterior (profane) and the private interior (sacred).

Loos' concept gives the building a markedly emotive character in order to express the individual's entry into a private, intimate world. To achieve this, he takes us on a carefully studied route along a veritable architectural promenade from the street to the depths of the house; in other words, he gives the circulation areas great psychological value, manipulating them so that we perceive the interior of the house gradually, in a controlled way. Each interior space has its own proportions, related to its character and the use to which it is to be put: he creates cells with different but interconnected heights, achieving a certain autonomy while maintaining their visual and functional relations. As a result, there is no uniform ceiling height and the small differences in floor level are linked by steps between functionally complementary zones. This spatial articulation, known as Raumplan, is found almost exclusively on the main floor of the house.

Loos excavates the interior of a pure prism as though it were a cave, giving psychological and functional qualities to each room: the form, proportions and finish of each space are designed to convey a particular state of mind. In the Müller house this spatial relationship is reinforced by the wall finishes in two areas. The living and dining rooms are undoubtedly where Loos' best and most successful interiors are to be found. The entrance leads into a tiny hallway, followed by a narrow staircase. After the obligatory turn for heightened theatricality, a large, luminous living room occupying the rear third of the building opens our ahead. The heart of the house has been reached. This vantage point offers a view of the living room and two flights of stairs leading in different directions, one to the right and one to the left. The living room is separated from the circulation area by an open wall, practically reduced to the solid blocks that mark the rhythm of the pillars. The clean, geometrical cuts in the wall afford a view of the complex arrangement of stairs that organises routes and articulates spaces, allowing a unitary perception of the different spaces. The dining room, which is smaller, is in direct contact with the living room. It is reached by the right-hand stairs, a flight of five steps that raises it above the level of the living room. The difference in height marks the different character of the two rooms: although connected spatially, they fulfil different social functions. The living room is bigger and higher because it is considered more public than the dining room, which has a more intimate feel. It is in this definition of different atmospheres and sensations that colour and claddings play an essential rôle: cipolin marble from Sion in the living room and mahogany in the dining room. But the veined green marble walls are merely the start of the explosion of colour in these rooms: yellow curtains and a red hearth in the living room, green curtains and the sienite table top in the dining room.

A similar effect is achieved in the second area of the house where the Raumplan is developed. The left-hand stairs from the living room lead to the Müllers' private area, divided into two clearly differentiated zones: the boudoir, well lit and clad in a light, satiny wood and, three steps higher, the library, a more secluded space which therefore has a lower ceiling and is clad in dark mahogany panelling. The use of materials that are carefully selected for colour and texture thus reinforces the private nature of the rooms, as each area of the house is conceived in terms of the intended atmosphere. “[...] the artist, the architect, first feels the effect he wishes to achieve then, with the eye of the spirit, the spaces he wishes to create. The effect that he wishes to have on the spectator, whether pure fear or horror as in prison, the fear of God as in church, respect for the power of the State as in the palace; pity as at a tombstone, a feeling of comfort as at home or gaiety as in a tavern, is produced by the materials and the form”⁹.
And unquestionably, I venture to add, by colour.