The Villa Muller's innovative design provoked a sensation in avant-garde circles.
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Loos aspired to an architectural equivalent of ''playing chess on a three-dimensional board,'' creating a series of multilevel, interlocking chambers with enticing glimpses of adjacent spaces. He perfected the system at the Villa Muller, varying the floor level and ceiling height of the rooms according to their function and significance. Loos's projects, which included a Paris house for the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara and an unbuilt Paris residence for the dancer Josephine Baker, often included a system of interconnected spaces that became known as ''Raumplan,'' or volumetric planning. He also wielded a vibrant color palette, using canary yellow on the exterior window frames and red on the radiators. He furnished the Muller family with Chippendale chairs, ivory doorknobs, mahogany paneling, silver embossed Japanese wallpaper, richly veined marble, Oriental carpets and silk curtains. His obsession with pared-down design found its fullest expression in the Villa Muller's unadorned white cubic facade.īut if Loos disdained ornament, he by no means advocated austerity. Loos even scorned the use of notches on his shoes, preferring that they be made of completely smooth leather. Loos is best remembered for his 1908 essay ''Ornament and Crime,'' which was among the first architectural tracts to idealize undecorated surfaces. Following a painstaking $1 million restoration, the building has opened to the public for the first time, as a museum.Ĭommissioned by a wealthy Czechoslovak engineer and building contractor, Frantisek Muller, the villa was completed in 1930, within a year of two other icons of modernism: Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye and Mies van der Rohe's Villa Tugendhat. Its intricate interiors were inaccessible for decades after Prague fell behind the Iron Curtain and the Communist regime seized the property, turning it into a succession of state-controlled offices including the ruling party's ideological institute.īut the villa, designed as an elegant private residence by the Viennese architect Adolf Loos, has emerged unscathed. THE Villa Muller, a landmark of early modernist architecture, nearly vanished in the tumult of postwar Czechoslovakia.
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