Moller House Architectural Model

This architectural object is inspired by the Moller House in Vienna — completed in 1928 by Adolf Loos, one of the most radical and consequential architects of the twentieth century. Spare, white, and almost aggressively restrained on the outside, it conceals one of the most spatially complex interiors of its era.

This model captures the street façade: the white rendered front elevation with its flat roof, symmetrically placed windows, and the single projecting box window above the entrance that is the façade's defining moment — the one element that breaks the wall's flat geometry and concentrates the building's entire compositional energy into a single precise gesture.

Read the full Moller House architecture guide

 

The street façade, distilled into form

 

Loos described his approach in a single sentence: 'outside the house is simple, inside its richness is shown in all its fullness.' The street façade of the Moller House is the most direct built expression of that principle. White rendered masonry, flat roof, windows of varying sizes placed without conventional compositional symmetry — and then, floating above the entrance, the projecting box window: a rectangular volume pushing forward from the wall plane, its shadow falling across the entrance below.

This façade model captures the elements that define that elevation:

• the flat white wall with its carefully varied window openings — restraint as an architectural position, not an absence of design
• the projecting box window above the entrance, the façade's single three-dimensional gesture and its entire compositional focus
• the entrance recess below, its depth given quiet emphasis by the overhang above it

Reduced to object form, the street façade reads as an argument: that a building stripped of applied ornament, organised around a single precise gesture, can achieve more presence and more character than one that reaches for decoration.

 

Why the Moller House works as an architectural model

 

The street façade translates exceptionally well into object form because its power comes from the relationship between a flat plane and a single projecting volume — a compositional idea that is completely legible at any scale. The restraint of the white wall makes the projection of the box window the more emphatic; at model scale that contrast is if anything sharper than at full size.

The Moller House is also an object with unusual historical depth. Designed in 1928 for a Jewish Viennese family, seized during the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, returned after the war, and now serving as the residence of the Israeli Ambassador to Austria — it is a building whose biography carries as much weight as its architecture.

 

Craft, materials, and finish

 

Each Moller House model is cast in fine plaster and finished by hand in our studio in West Sussex. The finish is intentionally plain, echoing the white render of the original building and allowing light and shadow to do the work — the projection of the box window casting its shadow across the entrance recess below, exactly as it does on Starkfriedgasse.

The model can be displayed on a shelf or desk, or mounted on the wall.

 

Product details

 

• Subject: Moller House, Vienna, Austria — street façade
• Architect: Adolf Loos
• Completed: 1928
• Architectural style: Viennese Modernism; Raumplan
• Designed and made by: Chisel & Mouse

 

Learn more about the Moller House

 

For a detailed exploration of the building's architecture, Adolf Loos's Raumplan principle, and the Moller House's place in the history of modern architecture, see our in-depth guide:

Moller House Architecture: Adolf Loos and the Architecture of Restraint