Bachelor Culture in the Work of Adolf Loos

The issue of gender in the architecture and writing of Adolf Loos arose from an ongoing debate over gender identification and roles in Viennese culture of the fin-de-siècle. Loos's critique challenged what he saw as the degradation of contemporary culture through its feminization. His masculinized alternative reclaimed the public realm for the rational and the pragmatic. Through this crucial maneuver, Loos tied modernity back to its class base, to an ideology of production and progress, and brought nineteenth-century positivism forward into the twentieth century, jumping over the "effeminate" interlude of art nouveau.