Book Review: The Judicious Eye: Architecture Against the Other Arts

No contemporary account of architecture's rapport with other arts will do justice without considering Adolf Loos's remarks on the subject. Exasperated by the Secessionist and Art Nouveau movements, and the utopia claims underpinning the objectives of reformist schools of the time, Loos made a modernist distinction between art and architecture. In his opinion, art has no responsibility to anybody, and thus it can be radical or even revolutionary. Architecture, instead, is responsible to everybody, and there is a purpose to it, a public one. This was enough reason for Loos to paint the art of building as both a conservative and collective practice.