From the outside, Byzantine churches are homely brick piles. The exterior surfaces of the architecture diminish in importance: the patterning of brick and stone supplant pseudo-classical elements, although these sometimes remain in a vestigial form.

Daphni, near Athens, c1100

It has been noted that while for the Greeks, architecture had primarily been a plastic art of exterior form, allied to sculpture, for the Romans it was the interior that was defined plastically. Although this distinction is already clear in Nero’s Domus Aurea, it reaches its peak in the Hadrianic interiors of the Pantheon and the Villa Adriana. Apollodorus has been criticised for not really resolving the collision of the circular drum of the Pantheon with the rectangular portico – certainly from the outside, the meeting is unlovely, and modest attention is paid to the exterior surface of the drum. But this is because the Pantheon is primarily (I should probably stop short of saying exclusively) an interior.

Byzantine space is an extension of this tendency. The exterior ceases to be a site of attention, but as the exterior becomes more and more prosaic, the interior becomes deeper, richer, and more ornate. The interior surfaces become particularly lavish. The plastically-defined volumes of Roman interiors become vivid spatial envelopes enclosed by a precious gold skin.

The bodies of the saints, angels, and courtiers who populate these envelopes hover over a gold mosaic ground. Their space is not defined by aedicules or contextual clues. They live over luminous gold depths, emphasising their detachment from things of this world. Candlelit, these surfaces are animate: glinting and shimmering amongst regions of deep shadow. The circular haloes around their heads were sometimes slightly dished, inducing an atmospheric disturbance in this divine ether as the light reflects off the curved surface, and making the head emerge from the plane of the wall.

The mosaic circles of the floor of S. Vitale in Ravenna, c547, are carefully given drop shadows, producing the effect that the floor is actually a series of layered geometries. The floor, like the walls visually dissolves and shimmers.

In S. Vitale the space is layered so that interior views ever yield a complete picture. We always look through into new depths. From almost any point on the plan, it is possible to see through two, three, or more layers. Although the chapel is circular, a spatial form typically associated with unity and visual completeness, it packs huge depths into its plan. There is a sense that the space is larger on the inside than it is on the outside. Later churches amplified this effect of the infinitely-extended interior: St Sophia in Kiev, c1040, is an extreme example: the central and transverse axes and dome devolve into a field of piers and cupola.

From the perspective of an architectural culture apparently convinced that exterior form is the primary rhetorical dimension of architecture, Byzantine churches appear unimpressive. But the spatiality of the interior and the calibration of diffusive effects are remarkable.

A curious thought following from the previous post: what if for Schinkel, the stripping of ornament that is performed at the New Pavilion is actually a marker of rurality, rather than urbanity, as Loos claims? In favour of this thought, the fact that the Pavilion is in fact a rural, or at least semi-rural building. It is constructed in the grounds of the Schloss Charlottenhof as a retreat for the Emperor, a place to withdraw from the formalities of the court and European politics, a place for ‘slumming it’. The simple form of the house would then be understood as a kind of poverty. The New Pavilion requires no extensive tour to reveal its extents. Rather, it sits in a clearing, able to be apprehended as a single block. Loos similarly makes his Moller house in Prague a single white block. But Loos calls on this blankness, these scraped surfaces, to signify the dislocated condition which he argues is innate to civility and urbanity; and perhaps it is in this movement that we might seek  Loos’ greatest originality.

At the close of ‘Architecture (1910)’, an essay in which Adolf Loos has described formulated his theory of the alienation of the architect, he concludes with a stellar commendation of Karl Friedrich Schinkel:

“But every time the minor architects who use ornament move architecture away from its grand model, a great architect is at hand to guide them back to antiquity. Fischer von Erlach in the south, Schluter in the north, were justifiably the great masters of the eighteenth century. And at the threshold to the nineteenth century stood Schinkel. We have forgotten him. May the light of this towering figure shine upon our forthcoming generation of architects!”

Schinkel is commended as a kind of lighthouse, invoked to shine forward onto the following generation, and simultaneously a guide to a return path, (along with Fischer von Erlach and Andreas Schlüter, to the ‘grand model’ of Classical antiquity. Just a little earlier, prior to this monumental figuring of Schinkel as an illuminating tower, Loos has remarked upon the potency of the Classical, which appears as a autonomous cultural force:

“Our culture is based on the knowledge of the all-surpassing grandeur of classical antiquity. We have adopted the technique of thinking and feeling from the Romans. We have inherited our social conscience and the discipline of our souls form the Romans… Ever since humanity sensed the greatness of classical antiquity, one common thought has unified all great architects. They think: the way I build is the same as the way the Romans would have built.”

The true power of great architects, it is implied, derives from the amorphous potency of Roman classicism, the ‘one common thought’. In this way, Loos disarms Schinkel, too, and places him on a pedestal as a lamp. Schinkel’s greatness, his potency, is in his channeling of the historical force which Loos has just described. It follows that when Loos makes his own claim to be carrying out a purified form of classicism, he is opening himself up more fully even than Schinkel to this classical daemon. Classicism is not merely a style, but an expression of a daemonic force, openness to which is associated with the stripping-off of ornamentation. He observes:

“It is no coincidence that the Romans were incapable of inventing a new column order, or a new ornament. For they had already progressed so far. they had taken all that knowledge from the Greeks and had adapted it to their needs. The Greeks were individualists. Every building had to have its own profile, its own ornamentation. But the Romans considered things socially. The Greeks could hardly administer their cities; the Romans administered the globe. The Greeks squandered their inventiveness on the orders; the Romans wasted theirs on the plan. And he who can solve the great plan does not think of new mouldings.”

The Greeks, not the Romans, were inventors of ornament. The Roman advancement is in the disregard they developed for ornament. Their inability to invent ornament is not a failure, but a mark of their progressiveness. Loos argues that the time has now come to move even closer to the ideal which the Romans represented. Not only should the production of new ornament be ceased by civilised people, but what ornament remains should be actively stripped off. Ornament may continue in the country, or for the non-urbane: the farmer and the shoemaker are less civilised in Loos’ terms, and there would be a sort of parental cruelty involved in taking ornamentation from them. The progressiveness of the Romans is in their urbanity, characterised by their disinterest in ornament. And it is this force of Roman progressiveness that Schinkel is taken to be a herald for.

The one work of Schinkel’s which could most easily be Loos’ is his New Pavilion in the Schloss Charlottenburg Park, built in 1824-25 for Freidrich Wilhelm III. It is a white, almost cubic mass, like Loos’ houses of the late twenties, especially the Moller and Muller houses. It does not present a distinct facade: in each face at the first floor level there is a dark recessed balcony; there is scant difference in the treatment of the front and side balconies. The facade retreats into the face of the block. It develops no baroque thickness, instead becoming a surface, as thin as a coat of white paint. Loos also repeatedly used the seating-niche arrangement which Schinkel uses in his Charlottenburg Pavilion: in the first floor Garden Room, the niche is opposite the balcony, and so someone seated in the niche looks across the room and out the window. Loos’ arrangement is more complex, but retains the basic pattern: seated in niche of the Moller House, we would be looking back through the interior and out towards the back garden.

Loosian touches are seen elsewhere in Schinkel’s oeuvre: the tent-room of the Charlottenhoff Palace uses fabric to create a ceiling canopy that drapes the walls and forms a canopy over the bed. In Loos’ bedroom for Lina Loos, the interior is similarly shaped by draping and spilling fabric: the fur which covers the bed spills onto the floor, and meets the wall-hangings.

What Loos would have us believe about the relationship between Schinkel and himself is that they share a common daemon. Schinkel’s significance for Loos is that he has opened himself to the civilising and urbanising force of this daemon; and this opening is marked particularly by Schinkel’s attitude to the removal of ornamentation as a movement of civility. Loos then casts himself in Schinkel’s light, as advancing this daemon‘s purposes even further, by opening himself more fully to it. Harold Bloom, according to his Anxiety of Influence (1973) calls this movement Daemonization, and suggests that it is a defensive move, a way to fend off the overbearing weight of a precursor. In this way, some of the elements of Loos’ mature work which we might take to be his most personal of touches: those signatory marks which we look for in order to recognise Loos in his work, might in fact be seen to be the points at which he is most closely Schinkel’s disciple.