Villa Müller Adolf Loos


Villa Müller in Prague was designed by architect Adolf Loos, assisted by architect Karel Lhota, in 1930 for František Müller and his wife, Milada Müllerová. The client was the owner of a company specialized in reinforced concrete, so the house was to be a showcase of this (at the time) pioneering technique as well as of the influent architect’s theories. The Villa, with its cubic shape and its white and austere façade, embodies in its exterior appearance the principles exposed by the architect in his seminal essay “Ornament and Crime”.
A strong contrast is staged between the simple, almost hermetic façade and the rich and complex interiors cladded in marble for the public areas and wood for the private rooms. The distribution is based on the principles of the Raumplan (spatial plan) already applied by Loos for the Ministry of War (“Kriegsministerium”) in Vienna in 1907. The Villa Mueller’s Raumplan is a complex exercise set to avoid the organization in separated floors and structure the space in a sequence of stepped areas while differentiating the height of the ceiling in relation to different functions.