WHAT BEAUTY DOES
I had a remarkable art history professor in college, Sylvia Boone, who began the semester by asking each student to list five things that were beautiful. After sharing our responses she explained that what each of thought was beautiful revealed a great deal about us, and much less about those things themselves. The interior of Adolf Loos’ Muller House in Prague might be a litmus test for architects and interior designers, exposing their deeply-held cultural and intellectual leanings. Some will find it too rich and some too restrained. I found it poised – remarkable, precisely – between
intellectual rigor
and sensual abandon.
From the outside the house is famously austere, a white concrete cube with small punched windows. Their Braille-like groupings reveal its compressed inner structure, the way its rooms are impressed upon one another, like organs in the body. The Muller House is revered by architects as the finest exemplar of the raumplan, Loos’s idea that a building is organized by spatial relationships between rooms rather than a floor plan. The narrow, turning wood staircase at its center is the origin of the building, from which all of its rooms unfold. The Living Room, at the back of the ground floor, is its largest and most finely expressed space. It’s narrow and wide, with a row of tall windows overlooking the backyard, that slopes dramatically down to the main street.
The walls are finished with panels of dark stained mahogany and a richly figured green marble, the kind of materials that would be used theatrically in a McMansion. But here the wood and stone panels – undeniably voluptuous – are fiercely elegant. Their over-the-top textures and colors are, somehow, quieted by the disciplined symmetries and proportions of the room, and its modest furnishings: three battered oriental rugs, a loveseat, two tables, and half a dozen upholstered chairs. As preserved and maintained by The City of Prague Museum, the room rests right at the tipping point between Tasteful Bourgeois and Arriviste Splendor. Standing inside it, a visitor feels excited and also settled. The room is luxurious but no single feature is too bright or too large; nothing pulls the eye. This interior brings something close to inner peace.
Photo from Muller House.