In this book of essays, noted architectural historian Christopher Long examines some of the many influences that shaped the work of the great architect Adolf Loos. Long’s finely tuned essays are exploratory journeys – brief excursions into Loos’s rich and complex intellectual world. Drawing from his detailed study of historical sources, Long presents new findings and sets the record straight, correcting errors and assumptions that have long been accepted as fact. He is deeply interested in Loos as an architect, but he is even more drawn to his profound and unique mind. Loos, as Long writes, saw that “the problem of modernism was not the problem of style, but the problem of understanding how the world was changing.”