Café Museum: interior

Loos’s professional design work at the end of the 1890s consisted mainly of interiors (mostly destroyed), in which furniture was built-in where possible. The best-known example is the Caf� Museum (1899; partly destroyed) opposite Olbrich’s newly completed Secession Building. Loos’s design for the Caf� Museum attained such an extreme of unornamented simplicity, with plain segmental ceiling and undecorated walls, that it became known as ‘Caf� Nihilismus’, much to Loos’s satisfaction.

The picture shows the interior of the Caf�; the furniture is not original.