Writing in 1990, Beatriz Colomina claimed that Adolf Loos was better known for his writings than for his architecture. True as this may have been, it does not mean that more was necessarily known about his writings than his architecture. Since then, however, a number of works devoted to investigating Loos's writings have appeared. A recent addition to this literature is Leben mit Loos, edited by two Austrian art historians, Inge Podbrecky and Rainald Franz, both of whom also make significant individual contributions to the collection: Podbrecky provides a detailed account of Loos's engagement with the Siedlungsbewegung, and Franz offers a set of reflections on his concept of culture. The volume is the result of a symposium held in the Looshaus in Vienna in 2006. Its title points toward the editors' ambition to reflect the breadth of Loos's cultural criticism, itself the product of a Nietzschean conception of culture that comprises “alle Lebensäusserungen eines Volkes.” The approach taken in the volume is interdisciplinary: Art and architectural historians are joined by literature specialists, musicologists, and cultural sociologists, all of whom offer their particular perspective on aspects of Loos's textual works. As is typical of such a volume, the fourteen articles collected here vary in quality and scope. The introduction, however, strives to articulate a unified approach that offers “einen möglichen Raumplan” for Loos's texts (15), seeking to do justice to their formal aspects, while also setting them in context to guard against the temptation of understanding them as part of a closed, self-referential system.

The most compelling contributions rise to the challenge of constructing a productive interplay between text and context. Elana Shapira, for example, revisits the question of Loos's engagement with men's fashion in the context of her own extensive doctoral research into Loos's relationships with his Jewish clients, such as Leopold Goldman. Her contribution, which finely combines Loos's cultural criticism and his architecture, argues that Loos's “modernist design granted [his Jewish clients] a sense of belonging to a new social milieu and served their integration interests in Viennese society” (67). Meanwhile, Susana Zapke explores correspondences between Loos and Arnold Schoenberg, presenting new material—at least in the field of Loos studies—from Schoenberg's Nachlaß to document the common framework of artistic and philosophical renewal that she sees articulated in their work. She does not engage with Loos's texts in as much detail as some other contributors, but her piece is exemplary in providing both a justification of method and a critical appraisal of its source material.

Sigurd Paul Scheichl offers a literary critical appraisal of Loos's writings, reminding the reader, as do the editors, that a scholarly edition of Loos's writings has yet to be produced. Among the many important points he makes regarding the formal aspects of Loos's texts, Scheichl argues that although Loos wrote in the first person, as is conventional for the essay form, it is not possible to simply elide the “I” of these essays with the real, existing Adolf Loos, since, “das ‘Ich’ bezeichnet eine sehr stilisierte Person” (113). Scheichl's remarks on style and stylization are themselves contextualized by Anders Munch in his assured contribution to the volume. He takes up the thematic of his monograph, Der Stillose Stil: Adolf Loos (Munich, 2005) to situate Loos's thinking on style, culture, and forms of life in the broader field of early-twentieth-century art theory and cultural philosophy. The strength of this contribution, which moves between Loos's writings and his architecture, is the ease with which it navigates complex theoretical discourse.

Although Munch's central concern is to show how Loos's writings were embedded in debates of their own time, other theoretically informed essays explore the actuality of his texts. Manfred Russo turns his attention to Loos's ethics of design, pointing to the relevance of his reflections on the relationship between production and consumption for a critique of global capitalism. Hermann Czech's opening piece, meanwhile, takes the Looshaus as its subject, reflecting on the critical potential opened up for contemporary architecture when the complexity of Loos's position on ornament is grasped. Other contributions to the volume do not directly set out to address the question of actuality but still find themselves demonstrating this in their presentation of central themes in Loos's writings. Themes such as food, fashion, affordable housing, gender, and sexuality (including pedophilia) retain their importance today. This wide-ranging volume, then, not only extends our understanding of Loos's writings in their contemporary context, but also offers insight into life, today, with Adolf Loos.