It is a collaboration with tradition, which each time brings new and astonishing results to light: literary texts by students of language arts at the University of Applied Arts are acoustically transformed by sound design students at the FH Joanneum in Graz.

Ö1 Kunstradio provides the framework for this collaboration and presents the results on air: nine short audio pieces with a wide range of content and design. What they have in common, however, is the theme: the architect and pioneer of modernism, Adolf Loos, his polemic "Ornament & Crime" and his pedophilia. Only in recent years has a debate arisen in Loos scholarship about the re-evaluation of Adolf Loos and his canonized work, in light of the serious sexual abuse of three 8-10 year old girls. The complete court file on the "criminal proceedings against Adolf Loos for defilement as well as seduction to fornication" was long considered lost until it was found a few years ago during an apartment clearance.

"Adolf Loos' polemic about the connection between the unadorned and the modern is still the subject of controversy more than a hundred years after it was written - not least because of the person of the author himself.

Now, at the Institute for Language Arts at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, aspiring authors have taken Loos' trenchant theses as the occasion for their own texts, some of which also link Loos' cultural-theoretical reflections to his criminal career - the architect was convicted as a sex offender towards the end of his life.

Nine short audio pieces were developed from those texts, nine confrontations that present Loos in many guises: as - obviously - a famous architect, but also as a catastrophic visionary, a dandyesque clown, a trickster, a maker of soundscapes, bar backdrops and column sanctuaries, and finally as a salt vessel prophet and - a twist on the horrific - a child molester.

The project was led by media artist and author Orhan Kipcak, who teaches "Medial, Experimental and Interdisciplinary Forms of Language Art" at the Angewandte. The audio design of the audio pieces was developed in collaboration with Astrid Drechsler, head of the sound design master's program at the FH Joanneum in Graz, and her students.

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