Two years before designing the unbuilt Moisi Villa for Venice, Loos had designed another unbuilt work, quite small, but which he could in theory have guaranteed was architecture, even if none of his houses should be considered as such: a projected 1921 mausoleum for the Czech-Viennese art historian, Max Dvorak, who died early that year. The Loos who polemically reserved, if not disqualified, the house from the category of architecture(not to mention art), had, once again in one of his best known flushes of extremism, in the 1910 essay entitled “Architecture” that only only a small portion of architecture belongs to the realm of art.: the tomb and the monument. Here then is a radically plain mausoleum consisting of a single square chamber of large stone blocks with a stone-block zigurrat roof: visibly just a box, with a sepulchral categorical supremacy no other building could top as unassailable architecture in the most dogmatically Loosian sense. No one could possibly look at the dark funereal sublimity of the projected Dvorak Mausoleum, his only actual tomb-cum-monument, and suppose that what makes it count absolutely as architecture is anything like ornamentation. Dvorak himself had written of imperial Roman architecture as based on “a new awareness of both the physical effect and the weight of cubic structure… on spatial beauty conceived in physical terms and on compact masses with natural limits”
2087
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