When this café opened in the spring of 1899, it sent a jolt through the city, because there was almost nothing on the walls.
, the architect who designed it, saw ornament as waste and eventually even as a mark of bad taste. No stucco, no plush, no gilded mirrors, just bent chairs, brass and light. A Viennese public used to chandeliers immediately rechristened it Café Nihilism.
That worked out exactly as you might hope. Within a few years and were sitting here, writers like would drop by, chess players filled whole afternoons, and the café became a fixed stop for everyone who was shaking things up in this neighbourhood.
Almost nothing of that interior survives. In the nineteen thirties the entire place was redone by another designer, and what you see inside today is a reconstruction of that second version, not the bare room Loos created.
From here the Operngasse runs straight towards the grandest stage in the city, .
Sources. Story: Wien Geschichte Wiki, Stadt Wien; Möbelmuseum Wien, documentation of the Café Museum interior Photos: Cafe Museum Strasse, Gryffindor, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
