Modernism is (not only) the great project aimed at liberating the individual from social constraints with the goal of unrestricted self-fulfilment for all. This process of individualising all areas of life through a profound reform went through several stages. Otto Wagner, the founder of Viennese Modernism, addressed the close interaction between artistic modernism, intimacy, and individuality, for instance through the famous publication of his bathroom with a glass bathtub. While Wagner was not given the opportunity to design public museums or government buildings, as the modern formal idiom (with its inverted and negative connotations) was still regarded as the private formal idiom of a rebellious minority. All the same, he designed the Viennese urban railway and other public infrastructures. The next generation, around his student Josef Hoffmann and Adolf Loos, Hoffmann's school colleague in southern Moravia, spread the reforming message of individual design of the environment to a wider circle. In two quite different ways they gave a new shape to the lives of the art-loving and wealthy offspring of the bourgeois founding fathers of the industrial era that allowed them to distance themselves from their parents' bombastic historicist ambiance. As a designer of interiors and planner of villas Loos was particularly popular among the critical intelligentsia and those from the world of fashion. The dwelling house, the most private of all building commissions, plays the main role his oeuvre. On this account MAK is showing an informative overview, curated by Markus Kristan (Albertina), of Loos' private houses, which he built in Vienna and Paris, in Czechia and Austria. Numerous models of reconstructions of his houses along with their innovative interior "Raumplan" are shown, as well as drawings from his estate, which is kept in the Albertina. Through their external discretion (smooth facades, cubic, "neutral" form) and their internal spatial richness these "casings" were in- tended to facilitate the development of individual privacy. The show in the Wienbiblio-thek, curated by Gerhard Murauer and Sylvia Mattl-Wurm, addresses the architect's own private life. A number of years ago the library acquired numerous documents and photographs from the collection of Franz Glueck, once Director of the Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien and publisher of Loos' collected writings. Manuscripts, letters from clients, sketches and photos from this collection are shown in the Boskovits apartment which Loos designed and which the Wienbibliothek has recently begun to use as an atmospheric location for events. Here one can get closer to the - at times irritating - personality of this architect, who helped many people who had been raised in a traditional way to develop a personality of their own.
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