Designed by Sam Jacob Studio A Very Small Part of Architecture resurrects Austrian Modernist architect Adolf Loos’s 1921 design for a mausoleum for art historian Max Dvorák. Though never built, the image of Loos’ design has haunted architectural culture ever since. Here the heavy dark and masonic form is recreated at 1:1 scale using a lightweight timber frame and scaffold net: A ghostly reenactment of an unrealised architectural idea.
It takes its title from Loos’ essay Architecture (1910 ) in which he argues that “only a very small part of architecture belongs to the realm of art: The tomb and the monument”.
Built within Highgate Cemetery, amongst the many monuments and memorials to the dead, A Very Small Part Of Architecture makes a different kind of memorial. Not one dedicated to a person, an event or a moment in time, not designed to remember the past but instead to imagine other possibilities, altered presents and alternative futures.
Joseph worked with Architecture Foundation to construct the Tomb.
It takes its title from Loos’ essay Architecture (1910 ) in which he argues that “only a very small part of architecture belongs to the realm of art: The tomb and the monument”.
Built within Highgate Cemetery, amongst the many monuments and memorials to the dead, A Very Small Part Of Architecture makes a different kind of memorial. Not one dedicated to a person, an event or a moment in time, not designed to remember the past but instead to imagine other possibilities, altered presents and alternative futures.
Joseph worked with Architecture Foundation to construct the Tomb.
