Loos would have regarded such ambitions as incomprehensible. He was, it is true, a man self-confessedly modern, a man who worked towards a better and more vital society; or more precisely against a claustrophobic and faded one. But his own understanding of his modernity is already so remote as to need comment.

One key to it is his insistently patrician and even supercilious view of his contemporaries. His was not the superciliousness of the aristocrat, however: Loos was a professing democrat, even something of an egalitarian, in spite of his weakness for the ceremonial display of the Viennese court.

His family was unremarkable, though his background was a strong influence. He was the son of a prosperous craftsman: a monumental mason who had been very conscious of the dignity of his trade. He had practised this trade of his and lived in Brno, on the border of the Czech and German-speaking Habsburg lands. Adolf Loos was born there in 1870; he was therefore 48 when the Habsburg Empire fell. He died in 1933, the year of the Nazi rise to power, a deaf, broken man in spite of his relatively young age. His writings were marked by the feeling their titles summed up: Ins Leere Gesprochen and Trotzdem (Spoken into the Void, and Nonetheless). The sense of contradiction is inherent from the outset. Loos had been – surely more than his father even – aware of the nobility and worth of the paternal calling. But his father had died when Loos was just over ten years old, and his veneration for his father's memory contrasted sharply with his distaste for his mother's ways, her drudging insistence on security and achievement. The army, the art-school and finally the American journey liberated him, severed the family ties and formulated his resolve to become an architect. Already, when he was a student at the Dresden Gewerbeschule, he showed his mettle. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he rejected the servitude of the fraternities and the brand of a duelling scar that went with it. It was not only his distaste for the philistine ways of most of his student contemporaries, but also a fastidious care for personal propriety and integrity which motivated him. And his civil courage was already firm.

The fastidiousness was already in evidence when he first went to do his military service in Vienna. Leather and silver objects of high quality became his passion. The designers of that time regarded surface as a free field for the ornamental inventor. Curves, lines, inlays of varied materials covered all available plane surfaces. Instinctively, Loos already sought the smooth, the barely chamfered or edged. A passion for smooth and precious surfaces was an instinctive preference – which, as I will try to show, he later rationalized. His period at arts-and-crafts schools had left him with an interest in ornament – as he recognizes in one or two autobiographical pieces; but when he returned to Austria, his taste had been cleared by the sharp, clear Anglo-Saxon air he had breathed. And he rejoiced that the sensible Viennese bourgeoisie had rejected the fancy ornament which had become so popular in Germany and France. He was, of course, a mythomane. His idea that ‘the American kitchen never smells of onion, that the American woman can prepare the most exquisite meal in a quarter of an hour; she twitters like a bird and always smiles ...’ could not be the product of much direct experience; in spite of the visits to Philadelphia cousins, his stay in America seems to have been taken up with nights washing-up in restaurants, living in the YMCA and poor lodgings, some journalism and occasional recourse to the breadline. But those three years in the United States did form Loos's view of what he was about decisively. He was to be an architect, and in that sense a builder like his father. But he was also to bring to Vienna the inestimable gift of western culture; his little magazine (of which only two numbers appeared) Das Andere (The Other) had as its subtitle ‘a paper for the introduction of Western culture to Austria’. This Western culture had a curious physiognomy. Its structure could not be described; it was made up of surface details, which together gave the outline of a fabled and highly desirable state of affairs. Look at the matters with which Das Andere dealt: clothes, manners, table manners in particular; begging; sexual mores among the very young; the overdecoration of Wagner's Tristan in the Vienna Opera; the ill manners of the very great (the Emperor Wilhelm II is named); street decorations for state visits and so on.