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‘Architecture as Autobiography’: Lived Space in Heinz Emigholz’s Loos

Ornamental’

Assembling Identities Conference Paper – 23 May 2013

The title of my paper for this morning’s panel is ‘Architecture as Autobiography’: Lived Space in
Heinz Emigholz’s Loos Ornamental’. This paper will consider Heinz Emigholz’s attempt to
construct a biography of Austrian architect Adolf Loos through a minimally mediated encounter
between architecture and cinema in his 2009 film, Loos Ornamental.1 The film is part of
Emigholz’s on-going series ‘Architecture as Autobiography’, a sub-category of a project started
by Emigholz in 1984 under the title ‘Photography and Beyond’ which by now extends to more
than thirty features. The ‘Architecture’ series also includes films on Rudolph Schindler, Louis
Sullivan and Bruce Goff among several others.

I will illustrate the paper with images taken from the film and a short clip of about 2
minutes, which demonstrates Emigholz’s filmic approach at the Villa Müller in Prague.

Taking Emigholz’s series title as a starting point, my paper offers a way of approaching
the autobiographical nature of the filmed architecture by suggesting that there is an aesthetic
relationship between the film and Loos’s design. The film opens with the site of Loos’s birth,
now a hotel bearing a plaque in his honour, documents Loos’s buildings in chronological order,
and closes with a sequence at his grave-site. The architecture is filmed with the minimum of
mediation: Emigholz uses long duration shots and static camera positions throughout, and
provides no voiceover or non-diegetic sound, only including white-on-black inter-titles to tell us
the name of the building, its location, the date of its construction, and the date it was filmed. On
one level, then, the structure of the film presents ‘architecture as autobiography’ by combining
the durational progression of the life, from Loos’s birthplace at the film’s start to his grave at its
finish, with only the images of his architecture, which thus stand in for a life-story. However,
beyond this deceptively simple structure, I will argue that the film’s aesthetic maps directly onto
two predominant theoretical underpinnings of Loos’s work: the departure from ‘ornament’ and
subsequent attention to material and surface; and his Raumplan (or space plan) – an approach
to building design that focussed on ‘lived space’ and was concerned with the inter-relationships
of the spaces that make up the interior of the building, a concern that was based on mobility and
the circulatory movement of bodies through space.

1
Loos Ornamental Dir. Heinz Emigholz, 2009

Alan Macpherson
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In making the architecture the material of autobiography, the central concern for
Emigholz is: How do you film the space of architecture in such a way as to adequately represent
the architect? By considering Loos Ornamental through the concept of ‘haptic visuality’, as
discussed by Laura Marks and Giuliana Bruno, I will explore how, through its attention to
surface and depth the film reproduces architectural space and thus embodies a Loosian identity.

Loos famously remarked on his own pleasure and satisfaction that the interiors of his
buildings could not be effectively represented in photographs. 2 And yet, Emigholz sets out to
photograph the interiors in his film under the guiding desire to enable ‘a specially designed
room to be mentally experienced as perfectly as possible [by the viewer] using sequences of
filmic images’.3 The image sequences follow a similar pattern: a combination of external views
provide distanced perspectives, enabling us to conceive the building in context with its
surroundings. Fragmented closer range shots of the exterior highlight the structures of the
building – stairs, windows and doorways – and the fabric of the facade, while interior shots seek
to articulate the materials, the surfaces, and the interplay of spaces within the buildings. Of
course there is a distinction between the still photographs to which Loos refers and the
cinematography of Emigholz, but it is a distinction that is in part elided by the conspicuously
photographic aesthetic of Loos Ornamental. The inability to effectively represent the interiors in
photographs, as Loos saw it, derived from the fact that the spaces possess tactile as well as
optical qualities. Consequently, the dilemma Emigholz is faced with is: ‘How do you film the
experience, the lived space of architecture?’

Andrew Benjamin asserts that the Loosian haus serves as the ‘locus in which surfaces,
spaces and circulation operate’.4 For Benjamin, Loos’s approach to creating space begins with a
‘recognition that what is wanted is not mere space but the creation of ‘effects’ [...whereby]
Effects are the work of surfaces that create spaces’ (Benjamin, pp. 24-25). Loos’s move away
from ornament as an unnecessary addition to art was most famously articulated in his 1908
essay ‘Ornament and Crime’, where he spoke of the urge to ornamentation in the modern era as
a symptom of either criminality, or degeneracy. His departure from ornament results in a
recognition, or elevation, of materials for their own sake.5 He writes: ‘“We should keep in mind
2
Adolf Loos, quoted in Colomina p. 270.
3
Heinz Emigholz & Marc Ries, ‘Loos Ornamental. Heinz Emigholz, Marc Ries – A Dialogue’. Online
[accessed 4 January 2013] <http://www.adolf-loos-film.com/about_dialog-en.html>
4
Andrew Benjamin, ‘Surface Effects: Borromini, Semper, Loos’, in The Journal of Architecture 11:1 (2006)
pp. 1-36, p. 26. Online [accessed 4 March 2012] <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602360600636099>
5
For discussions of Loos and ornament see primarily Adolf Loos, ‘Ornament and Crime’, in Ornament and
Crime: Selected Essays (Riverside, CA: Adriane, 1998) pp. 167-76; also Akos Moravansky, ‘The Ornament:
Salvation or Crime?’, in Competing Visions: Aesthetic Invention and Social Imagination in Central European
Architecture, 1867-1918 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998) pp. 285-332; and Christopher Long, ‘The
Origins and Context of Adolf Loos’s “Ornament and Crime”’, in Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians 68:2, (2009), pp. 200-223, among others.

Alan Macpherson
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that noble material and fine craftsmanship not only make up for exquisiteness, but they are
even superior in terms of opulence”’.6 The use of ‘exquisite’ materials conveys, or ‘effects’,
grandeur in the absence of superfluous and degenerate ornamentation. Hence, there is a central
focus on material and cladding evident within the interiors on display in Loos Ornamental.
Throughout the various buildings Emigholz’s camera dwells repeatedly on the richly veined
marble and the varied tones and grains of the wood which Loos uses both as cladding and
furniture. The emphasis Emigholz places on such footage reinforces the inherent tactility of the
surface material in the construction of the spaces which it encloses.

Laura U. Marks provides a useful way of approaching the cinematic encounter with
tactility in her theory on haptic visuality. Marks derives her understanding of haptic visuality
from the 19th century Austrian art critic Alois Reigle, who distinguished between haptic and
optical images in the transition from pre- and early Roman art, to late Roman art. His argument
turns on the idea that at this juncture in art history a shift occurs from objects depicted on a
single plane, distinguished from that plane by colour and/or relief, to a greater representation
of illusionistic depth and the depiction of three dimensionality. Here, ‘haptic’ refers to the tactile
bond that exists between the plane and the object, contained on a single, unified surface, while
the optical image denotes the appearance of spatial depth. For Marks, as such, ‘[h]aptic looking
tends to move over the surface of its object rather than to plunge into illusionistic depth, not to
distinguish form so much as to discern texture’.7 ‘In haptic visuality’, she writes, ‘the eyes
themselves function as organs of touch’ (Marks, p. 162). The images shown here highlight the
concern with surface apparent in both Loos’s design, and Emigholz’s apprehension of that
design on film. These images seem to speak specifically to this type of visuality. The object of the
image is not immediately identifiable, as would be the case in a purely optical image, but rather,
the viewer is taken in close to the surface; the surface of the marble, wood, the tiny folds in the
fabric and tassels of the lampshade, fill the surface of the screen such that there is as little as
possible separation between the viewer and the object under scrutiny. This is redoubled by the
duration of the images (here shown as stills) which each last for several seconds, bringing us, as
it were, into a prolonged contact with the materiality of the surface. The result is that we are
drawn to the texture, to the ‘feel’ of the image, through the proximity of details that are
perceived within touching distance. Marks suggests that ‘[H]aptic visuality involves the body
more than is the case with optical visuality. Touch is a sense located on the surface of the body:
thinking of cinema as haptic is only a step toward considering the ways cinema appeals to the
body as a whole’ (Marks, p. 163). Here, Marks points us towards both the physicality of the

6
This quote is taken from, Adolf Loos, ‘Hands Off!’, cited in Moravansky, p. 286.
7
Laura U. Marks, The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2000), p. 162.

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spaces that these surfaces enclose, and in doing so, gestures towards an even greater sense of
embodied viewing, at which we will arrive shortly.

Loos’s Raumplan, his approach to spatial design, has at its fundament, an attention to
habitation, a concern with bodies, with ‘living’ the space. As such, the Raumplan plays out the
conjunction Benjamin notes in Loos, of surface, space and circulation. Loos discovered the
greatest expression of this plan in the Villa Mü ller, built in Prague between 1928 and 1930.8 The
configuration of space in the Loosian haus centres on a continuous structure of spaces
interweaving and connecting through linking apertures and across different levels. What
emerge as a result are spaces which convey a combination of stasis and movement – such as
seating areas, open, connected rooms, and stairwells – and which activate viewing positions
within the house. We find seating alcoves, such as the one in the Villa Mü ller (which we’ll see on
the clip in a moment) in which the view is turned back inwards on the house, rather than to the
exterior, and a view, like that from the living room, that affords visual access to the adjoining
raised dining room and also through to the stairwell and up to the next level. Andrew Benjamin
suggests that the Villa Mü ller living-space thus: ‘needs to be understood [not as a ‘room’ but] as
a specific spatial condition’. It is a condition that combines the enclosed space of the sedentary
subject within a nexus of the structural possibilities of movement through the spaces that
privileges the mobile subject. ‘There is’, writes Benjamin, ‘both movement and arrest. The two
subject positions are the effect of the architecture’ (Benjamin, p. 27).

I’m now going to show a short clip from the Villa Mü ller sequence which will hopefully
give you at least a sense of the film (which runs to 72 minutes). By illustrating both the
durational and sequential effects of the shooting, we see, in this clip, how the circulation effect
of the Raumplan is achieved. It’s worth bearing in mind a comment from Beatriz Colomina, who
provides a useful bridge between inhabiting the Loosian interior and Emigholz’s approach to
filming these spaces. She notes that ‘upon entering a Loos interior one’s body is continually
turned around to face the space one has just moved through, rather than the upcoming space or
the space outside. With each turn, each return look, the body is arrested’. 9

The Villa Mü ller sequence runs for about ten minutes, but due to time constraints I’m
showing only two minutes. The clip begins inside the house, with the seating alcove mentioned
earlier.

The passage through each of the buildings of Loos Ornamental corresponds almost
precisely with Colomina’s interpretation of entering a Loos interior – the inward turn of the
8
See Benjamin, p. 26.
9
Beatriz Colomina, ‘Interior’, in Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1996), pp. 232-81, p. 234.

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gaze, and the static positioning which suggests the bodily ‘arrest’ are evident in Emigholz’s
camera positions and sequence constructions. It is in this way that the architectural motivations
of the Raumplan manifest themselves in their cinematic equivalent. The sequence on the Villa
Mü ller is a case in point.
On one hand we find Colomina’s return gaze. When Emigholz moves us from the
secluded seating area through into the living room, he turns the camera back on the direction
from where he has come. The latticed aperture above the alcove is evident, now, from the other
side. As we saw, the sequence of shots then proceeds through the house, moving up the stairs
and into the upper spaces, before returning to the living room several minutes later. At this
point the film moves around the room, the shots turning back on themselves in contemplation
of what has come before. This can be seen by looking at the progression through these images,
which come shortly after the clip we just saw, and by noting the reappearance of the vase and
plant. As Emigholz explains, ‘“the viewers’ thought processes in the cinema are trained to
receive an accumulation of different viewpoints that come together as an imaginary overall
picture as the film progresses’” (Ries/Emigholz dialogue). As such, Emigholz’s move to engender
a ‘mentally experienced’ space utilises the effect of the Raumplan’s spatial-circulatory design by
following and recording the path through the space as a montage ‘accumulation’.

On the other hand, Emigholz’s approach also suggests the bodily arrest. This too stems
from the accumulation, but in this case it is the stasis and duration of the shots, not the
movement between shots that is significant. Each shot is a pause; a real-time representation of a
specific view and space. In a way, the sense of inhabiting the house which Emigholz desires, the
sense of a ‘perfect’ mental experience of the space, is disrupted by the cuts between shots. And
yet, while fragmenting our sense of presence within the filmed space, the decision to shoot with
a static camera creates a highly meditative viewing experience. It places the emphasis of the film
on duration. Removed from the perimeter of the frame, which remains still, movement in each
shot is confined to the contents of the frame, to the passage of time and the subtle effects of a
breeze on the foliage outside or play of shifting light on an interior surface. The combination of
long duration shots and sequences of shots on the same object in the absence of non-diegetic
sound, result in a demanding cinematic experience. As spectators we are required to engage
with the image, to wander across the image, to search for movement, study the surface – or
juxtaposition of surfaces – under scrutiny, or establish the spatial relations between past,
present and future shots. The result is an embodied spectator, one who becomes involved in,
and who inhabits the re-constructions of these spaces.

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This notion of the embodied spectator finds articulation in Giuliana Bruno’s Atlas of
Emotion.10 Here Bruno theorizes the relationship between architecture and cinema through a
model of expanded haptic visuality that moves beyond Marks’s concept by considering the
virtual embodiment of the spectator in the film. Bruno writes:

There is a mobile dynamics involved in the act of viewing films, even if the spectator is
seemingly static. The (im)mobile spectator moves across an imaginary path, traversing
multiple sites and times. […] Film inherits the possibility of such a spectatorial voyage
from the architectural field, for the person who wanders through a building site also
absorbs and connects visual spaces. In this sense, the consumer of architectural
(viewing) space is the prototype of the film spectator. [...]This relation between film and
the architectural ensemble involves an embodiment, for it is based on the inscription of
an observer in the field. Such an observer is not a static contemplator, a fixed gaze, a
disembodied eye/I. She is a physical entity, a moving spectator, a body making journeys
in space. (Atlas, pp. 55-6)

There is an implication in Bruno’s work here which seems to relate directly to Loos Ornamental.
For Bruno, the haptic nature of cinema relates to habitation. The cinematic space enables the
spectator to travel and the sense of spatial apprehension implicit in this idea of travel relates by
necessity to our tactile senses – hence Loos’s notion that his interiors could not be captured in
photographs, but had to be experienced by bodies-in-space. The position of Emigholz,
positioning and standing behind the camera, moving precisely as a ‘body-in-space’ through the
lived-space of the Raumplan interior, inscribes this experience onto the filmic image that we as
spectators consume. For Bruno, the moving images of the cinematic experience bring about the
embodiment of the spectator, enabling the viewer to inhabit the cinematic space (Atlas, p. 250).
In an earlier version of one of the chapters from Atlas of Emotion, an essay titled ‘Site-Seeing’,
she writes:

Film creates space for viewing, perusing, and wandering about. As in all forms of
journey, space is physically consumed [...]. In film, architectural space becomes framed
for viewing and offers itself for consumption as traveled space. (Site-Seeing, p. 17)

Thus, through her expanded notion of haptic visuality, by reaching beyond the notion of merely
touching with the eye towards a more kinaesthetic sense of mobility and embodiment, Bruno
provides a way of conceiving the space of the film as an inhabitable space, resolving the problem
of how to film the experience of architectural space, by bringing that space into a proximal
relation to the viewing subject.

Indeed, this fluid conception of haptic visuality results in a sense not only of the
experience of Loos’s buildings – thereby embodying a Loosian identity – but a greater sense of

10
Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion (London; New York: Verso, 2002).

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personal embodiment in relation to the film’s surface, thus reinforcing our own identity as it
exists in relation to the screen.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Andrew, ‘Surface Effects: Borromini, Semper, Loos’, in The Journal of Architecture
11:1 (2006) pp. 1-36, p. 26. Online [accessed 4 March 2012]
<http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602360600636099>

Bruno, Giuliana, Atlas of Emotion (London; New York: Verso, 2002)

Colomina, Beatriz, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1996)

Emigholz, Heinz & Ries, Marc, ‘Loos Ornamental. Heinz Emigholz, Marc Ries – A Dialogue’. Online
[accessed 4 January 2013] <http://www.adolf-loos-film.com/about_dialog-en.html>

Marks, Laura U., The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2000)

Long, Christopher, ‘The Origins and Context of Adolf Loos’s “Ornament and Crime”’, in Journal of
the Society of Architectural Historians 68:2, (2009), pp. 200-223

Loos, Adolf, ‘Ornament and Crime’, in Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays (Riverside, CA:
Adriane, 1998)

Loos Ornamental Dir. Heinz Emigholz, 2009

Moravansky, Akos, ‘The Ornament: Salvation or Crime?’, in Competing Visions: Aesthetic

Invention and Social Imagination in Central European Architecture, 1867-1918 (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1998) pp. 285-332

Alan Macpherson