Overlaying this metaphorical synchronicity are apparently more personal allusions to Baker herself вЂ“ her skin, her striped suits, her penetration of white society. This optically dazzling facade is redolent with allusions, from the American flag, zebras, tattoos, bathing suits and prison uniforms, to monochromatic Italian cathedrals and Moorish bathhouses, all calculated to connote a sense of вЂothernessвЂ™. Rising from an unrusticated plain white base, the dwelling takes the form of a simple prism and cylinder enclosed in a smooth carapace of alternating bands of black and white marble.

What Loos called a вЂSmall VarietГ© for Josephine BakerвЂ™ was a proposal for a four-storey house occupying a corner site between Avenue Bugeaud and Rue du GГ©nГ©ral-Clergerie in ParisвЂ™s wealthy 16th arrondissement. Monochrome geometry of the American Bar, Vienna, completed 1908. The most beautiful aspect of the house is a swimming pool, with supernatural light effects.вЂ™ The outer wall is covered with white and black marble plates вЂ“ horizontally striped. вЂI drew a plan for JosephineвЂ™, wrote Loos. Such freedom inculcated her public image with a level of dissonance that contrived to unsettle audiences and disrupt stereotypes. Despite the psychological costs, this allowed her to finance and finesse a degree of freedom otherwise difficult to attain as a member of a racially excluded minority. Prodigiously talented and physically striking, BakerвЂ™s cultivation of her perceived exoticism in stage shows enabled her to become a black woman of means, a rare and disquieting conjunction for the times. Uniquely inflected by the multi-layered persona of its remarkable client/muse, it is also a complex and highly charged moment in the shifting dynamics of gender, class and race relationships in the early modern era. In its formal rationale and experiential richness, it is emblematic of ModernismвЂ™s slowly coalescing intensities of skin, interiority, hygiene, corporeality and transparency. Image: Wilson Yau / RIBA Collections courtesy of nai010 uitgevers / publishersДestined to remain unbuilt, and for many years ignored by Loosian scholars, the Baker House reconceptualises fin-de-siГЁcle Viennese cultural discourse to frame the myth of the celebrity as a modern totem. Model of the Baker House, designed by Loos in 1927 but never built.

Adolf loos projects