Edinburgh College of Art Event, Professor Masheck ECA Lecture

Edinburgh College of Art Talk : Architecture

ECA Architecture Talks & Exhibitions

Centenary Lecture Series Given By Professor Joseph Masheck, Centenary Fellow And Visiting Professor Of History Of Art

Edinburgh College of Art Lectures

Professor Masheck is an eminent American art critic and art historian and is the College’s Centenary Fellow and Visiting Professor of History of Art.

This series of three lectures developed out of Professor Masheck’s earlier lectures at the College in 1999 and 2003, on aspects of the work of Adolf Loos (1870-1933), the early modern Viennese architect.

Both previous lectures had American connections. But this new series will focus on Loos as a vital figure in the formation of European modernism. Loos has stirred interest as a renegade figure in cultural history, mostly for his condemnation of ornament by comparing it with tattoo as essentially transgressive for a modern European; and he is also known to have claimed that almost no buildings should count as art.

These and other critical tantrums led to his being considered an anti-architect; but the governing theme in the lectures is that Loos was really a great artist-architect who defended his essentially modern position with wit and flair.

5 Mar: The Ornamental in Loosian Theory & Practise
This lecture deals mainly with problems and consequences of Loos’s ‘tattoo’ and non-architecture ideas.

12 Mar: Formalism, Functionalism & The Wittgenstein House as Loosian
This lecture re-thinks the question of a famous house which the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein designed for his sister, as related to the work of Loos.

19 Mar: Adolf Loos, Architecturelessness & The Sustainability of Art
This lecture concerns the architect’s overlooked work in middle-class and proletarian housing, and implications of such works for a possible ‘green’ Loos.

ALL LECTURES ARE FREE AND WILL BE GIVEN IN THE LECTURE THEATRE, MAIN BUILDING, EDINBURGH COLLEGE OF ART, COMMENCING AT 6PM.

photo © Adrian Welch Sep 2006