About this talk

Running time: 29 minutes

Yehuda Safran, born in 1944 in Haifa, studied in London in the 1970s: art and architectural history at the Royal College of Art and philosophy at London University. He has taught and lectured in the UK, USA and Israel, and was a tutor at the RCA and at the AA in London at the time of this talk. He has published many articles and was the editor and main contributor to the book that accompanied the Adolf Loos exhibition which he prepared for the Arts Council (UK). This opened in 1986 at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art and has since been shown in London, Tel-Aviv, Karlsruhe and New York.

In his talk he refers to Loos as "a seminal figure of Vitruvian dimension", and he discusses Loos' work and ideas. "At a time in which the beginnings of the Modern movement, and what it stood for, are being re-examined, Loos as a pre-Modern or as among-the-first-Moderns becomes very important to us. Only now can we read his critical essays without finding them obscure or inaccessible... In a period of relative abundance the issues he raised come to the fore - appropriate style, appropriate way to approach the task of building - and he offers us a fresh way of examining these questions".

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