Adolf Loos: A Private Portrait

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Claire Beck Loos

Doppelhouse Press, Los Angeles, 2011, English

Nonfiction, Architecture

5.25 x 7.25 inches, hardcover, 200 pages 35 black-and-white illustrations

ISBN: 9780983254003

Suggested Retail Price: $24.95

This intimate 140-page biography of the early Modern architect Adolf Loos was written by the architect’s last wife, Claire Beck Loos. Lively and often humorous vignettes provide “Snapshots” of the last years of Loos’ life (1929-1933), and reveal the personality and philosophy that helped shape Modern architecture in Vienna and the Czech lands. Claire Beck Loos was a photographer and writer, born in 1904 in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia. Her immediate and extended families were Jewish industrialists and early clients of Loos. An introduction and afterword frame the first English translation of the work, which was originally published in German in 1936 to help pay for Loos’s tombstone. A contribution by Janet Beck Wilson, Claire’s surviving niece, and never-before seen photographs supplement the text. This unusual, literary biography has also become a self-portrait of a vibrant young woman who died a tragic and untimely death at Riga, a Nazi concentration camp, in 1942. The book honors her memory as well as her artistry.

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