Adolf Loos /

Adolf Franz Karl Viktor Maria Loos (10 December 1870 – 23 August 1933) was a Moravian-born Austro-Hungarian architect. He was influential in European Modern architecture, and in his essay Ornament and Crime he repudiated the florid style of the Vienna Secession, the Austrian version of Art Nouveau. In this and many other essays he contributed to the elaboration of a body of theory and criticism of Modernism in architecture. Born in 1870 in Bruenn (Brno), Moravia, to an ethnically German family, Loos was only nine when his stonemason father died. He completed technical school in Liberec, Czech Republic, which is now Technical University Liberec (a plaque located in front of Pavilion H commemorates this) and later studied at Dresden Technical University before moving to Vienna. He contracted syphilis in the brothels of Vienna, and by age 21 he was sterile; in 1893 his mother disowned him.