Negotiating Modernity: The Cultural Role of Fur in Architectural Modernism of Fin de Siècle

Folklore about shapeshifting creatures has long associated the transformation between human and beast with the dermatological contact between skin and fur. However, the study of fur, which has primarily focused on its political-economic history as an object of colonial trade in North America and Europe, remains relatively silent on how the imagination of fur as a transformative medium has influenced the cultural history of Western modernity. This paper addresses this gap by examining the interior design “Lina’s Bedroom” (1903) by Adolf Loos, one of the paradigmatic figures of architectural modernism in the early twentieth century. Dedicated to his wife, the bedroom features an opulent, fur-lined space whose highly ornate tactility immediately poses a theoretical paradox to Loos, who, on the one hand, promotes the abolishment of ornamentation as a crime against modern civilization and, on the other, hesitates to forego this decorative practice entirely. To resolve this conundrum, Loos produced a series of essays that kept redrawing the discursive boundary between modernity and primitivism. Reading “Lina’s Bedroom” against these writings, the paper argues that, despite Loos’s attempt to insulate modernity from primitivism, this fur-lined boudoir always threatens to render their boundary permeable by channeling the shapeshifting power registered in the imagination of fur. The paper concludes that primitivism has always been integral to architectural modernism as its haunting, hirsute shadow.