In this generously illustrated study of the Looshaus in Vienna, Christopher Long presents a multifaceted account of this once controversial and now widely admired building. Situated on Vienna's Michaelerplatz, opposite an entrance to the Hofburg Palace, Adolf Loos's Looshaus was completed in 1911 for the elite Goldman & Salatsch tailor and outfitting firm as a showroom, business office, and work studio on two floors with rental apartments on the upper four floors. Long presents his findings in fifteen short chapters that offer a chronological narrative of the project's development, while also following Loos's personal life as he struggled emotionally, physically, and professionally to get the project built to his design. The chapters zoom in and out of the building itself to encompass not only its design principles and the local debates surrounding it, but also his close friendships with Viennese culturati, including Peter Altenberg, Karl Kraus, and Oskar Kokoschka. Long is able to knit all of this together convincingly by always keeping Loos and the building at the center of his story.

The book starts with the clients, Leopold Goldman and Emanuel Aufricht, who bought the prominent site as a redevelopment opportunity. They held a private competition for the design in 1909, then rejected all the entries and awarded the commission instead to an untested Loos who had previously done a showroom for the company but had never designed a building of this size or importance. Long returns often to the complicated relationship between Loos and his clients, who suffered along with him as the project languished, but ultimately stood by his design.

One strength of the book is Long's success at situating this well-known project more firmly within both the architectural culture of Vienna at the time and Loos's own body of work. Long argues, for example, that the well-known essay “Ornament and Crime,” which is usually dated to 1908, was actually written in early 1910 at the same time that Loos was working on Michaelerplatz. As Long's analysis shows, Loos wrote the text as a provocation to gain attention for himself and potentially more allies in the Looshaus debates, which became more vicious in the press as the building started to take shape on the square. Communications between Loos, the city building authorities, and the professional community are described in intricate detail, highlighting the radicality of Loos's formal choices in a city with entrenched professional alliances and conservative aesthetics.

Despite the battles, the reader knows that this iconic building was built in the end. In vividly descriptive passages, Long writes affectionately about the building, which he says was “stunning” with “a quiet dignity” that silenced critics with the quality of its construction (157). In the book's best and final chapter, Long traces the building's reception from the demise of Goldman & Salatsch in the early 1920s, to obscurity in the 1930s, a revival of interest in the 1960s, and up to the present day as the building continues to attract historians looking to rewrite the early history of modernism. There is one component missing from this analysis, however, since Long fails to discuss the Czechoslovak reception of Loos, a native of Brno, including Karel Teige's chapter on him in the book, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia (1930) [Originally published as Karel Teige, Moderní architektura v Československu/ L'architecture moderne en Tchécoslovaquie/ Neues Bauen in der Tschechoslowakei (Prague, 1930) and translated in Karel Teige, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia and Other Writings, trans. Irena Žantovská Murray and David Britt (Los Angeles, 2000).]

As a research project, the focus on a single building does have its drawbacks. The book is not as ambitious in its scope and argumentation as one might want. With the exception of discussions of Loos's own theoretical work, Long does not link Loos's thinking to other architectural or cultural debates outside of Vienna. In this sense, the book is inward looking, taking a landmark building and delving deeply into its conception without ever stepping back to reconsider its place within other narratives—architectural, cultural, or otherwise. Even in the terms he set for the research, Long's efforts are impeded at times by his sources, which do not yield all of the details that would allow him to make more definitive conclusions. Instead, the text is full of speculative passages about what may or may not have happened or what various actors' motives might have been, sometimes overwhelming the flow of the text.

In conclusion, as a complete study of an important building, its architect, and its owners in early-twentieth-century Vienna, the book has much to offer readers with an interest in the history of Vienna, architectural history, or cultural politics in Austria. It is also an elegant case study that shows the potential and limitations of such an approach.