Steiner House: front

The Steiner house was designed for the painter Lilly Steiner and her husband Hugo. It is located in a Vienna suburb where the planning regulations were strong enough to have a direct impact on the final design.

Loos was a remarkable architect when working within the limits imposed by the shape of the site or external forces, like the planning codes. The regulations only permitted a street front with one story and a dormer window (a window built in a sloping roof). The large window at the front brings light into the painter’s atelier situated on the first level. The garden fa�ade is three-storied, and with the use of the semi-circular metal-sheathed roof, Loos manages to articulate the transition between the front and garden elevations.

The Steiner house became a highly influential example of modern architecture; it played a significant role in establishing Loos’s reputation as a modern architect to the audience outside of the Viennese community and became an obligatory reference for architects during the 1920s and 30s. Almost all of the literature of the Modern Movement has reproduced the garden fa�ade as an indisputable example of radical rationalist modern architecture.

The stripped fa�ade was rapidly assimilated into the formal purism of the 1920s; it was the main reason for the success of the building.