Christian Kravagna: Adolf Loos and the Colonial Imaginary

This paper reads Adolf Loos in a postcolonial perspective. In his building practice, Viennese architect Adolf Loos, a co-founder of modern architecture, had no direct relation to colonialism. Nevertheless, in his numerous writings Loos proclaimed a concept of modernity that was committed to colonial imaginations and conceptions. The lecture concerns itself with some of the recurring motives in Loos’ writings on modern (everyday) culture and examines their significance in a non-colonial Austrian context. Loos will be considered as paradigmatic for the distinct shape that colonial worldviews and colonial rhetoric took on in European countries not directly engaged in the colonial project. Of special interest in the case of Loos is his aim of a cultural self-proselytization of Austria that is based on the contraposition of civilization and the primitive well established in other discourses on modernization but adjusted to regional/national particularities which differ from the typical colonial constellation.

Christian Kravagna is an art historian, critic and curator. He is Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He is the editor of the books Privileg Blick. Kritik der visuellen Kultur, Berlin 1997; Agenda. Perspektiven kritischer Kunst, Vienna/Bozen 2000; The Museum as Arena: Artists on Institutional Critique, Cologne 2001 and Routes: Imaging travel and migration, Frankfurt 2007. Kravagna has curated exhibitions like Living Across: Spaces of Migration, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, 2010; Planetary Consciousness, Kunstraum der Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, 2008; Migration: Globalisation of Cultural Space and Time, Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi, 2003 (with Amit Mukhopadhyay) and Routes: Imaging travel and migration, Grazer Kunstverein 2002. Since 2005 he is curator (with Hedwig Saxenhuber) at Kunstraum Lakeside in Klagenfurt, a center for contemporary art and theory.

The lecture series 2011/2012 addresses the question: Is there architecture history after Foucault? The IKA invites historians, scientists and architecture theorists from various fields and disciplines to discuss more fundamental issues of the practices of a historian which are diversely effected by the major impact of Michel Foucault’s writings. However, the main focus of the lectures is rather generally on methodo-logical approaches of subsequent historical research and knowledge. The lectures will help to redefine architecture history’s position today.