Lively, snapshot-like vignettes form an intimate, literary portrait of the infamously eccentric and influential modern architect Adolf Loos.

Written by Loos' third wife, the photographer Claire Beck (1904–1942), these often humorous, short episodes reveal Loos' temperament and philosophy during the last years of his life (1928–1933). His irreverent personality and attitudes about post-Imperial Viennese society, the role of the craftsman, and the organic beauty of raw materials are brought to light. Included in The Private Adolf Loos are Claire's photographs of Loos, collected in museums, as well as informal snapshots of the two of them showing the whimsy and theatricality of this relationship between two artistic personalities—one as infamous as he was well-regarded, and one, a youthful accomplice and budding photographer who would also become Loos' intermediary, secretary and proxy. With this bricolage of short tales and its dark conclusion at the brink of death's door, Claire shows herself to be one of Loos' great champions and memorialists, despite his shortcoming and debilitations. This is not a book just about architecture, but rather a love story about the Modern revolution that provides a woman's insight into one of its most radical personalities, set amid the fascinating cultural backdrop of 1920s and 1930s interwar Europe.

Lively, snapshot-like vignettes form an intimate, literary portrait of the infamously eccentric and influential modern architect Adolf Loos.

Adolf Loos, the Czechoslovak-Viennese theorist and architect, is widely thought to be 20th-century architecture's most controversial figure. His scathing jeremiads on hypocrisy and ornament have generated their own torrent of interpretations, only to prove the enduring fecundity of his ideas. Claire wrote [Adolf Loos Privat] — first published in 1936 — to raise money for the tombstone Loos designed for himself. The book is so very alive with his presence, however, that surely it was a means to keep him close to her. [?] In razor-sharp anecdotes, some a paragraph, some several pages, Claire writes in the present tense. The result is altogether Loosian: timeless, with as little ornament, but as much empathy, as any protégé could deliver. Here, theory in the flesh walks in.
—Barbara Lamprecht, coauthor of Neutra, Complete Works, book review for the Society of Architectural Historians