October 28, 2005 | 11:30 am

Hanging Loose with Adolf Loos
In an earlier post I wrote that kunst, for art, was a good word to know in Vienna. Later I mentioned gesamtkunstwerk, which the IHT explained as "the attempt to turn all objects of everyday life into a concerted work of art," and which I have also found defined as "total artwork," as in multiple forms (song, dance, painting) fusing to make a single work of art (such as opera). Stay with me here - I'll be getting back to gesamtkunstwerk.

Here's a new one: baukunst: architect. Vienna is a city that appreciates good architecture, both in theoretical and practical forms. A visit to the MAK, the Museum of Applied Arts, is helpful on both counts. Its collection includes a room full of models by architectural superstars like Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind and Zaha Hadid. Hadid's fire station looks like a space craft poised to take flight, while Gehry's Santa Monica residence looks like the shipyard where it was built.

Downstairs in the museum shop, Zaha Hadid t-shirts were moving briskly. And where else, I thought, do they sell t-shirts devoted to an architect who, though long-regarded as brilliant within her field, had not seen many of her designs turned into buildings until recent years? Later I learned that Hadid, a Baghdad-born Briton, teaches at the School of Applied Arts that adjoins the MAK.

The MAK also sells a 256-page "Vienna by MAK" guide at the entrance counter - well worth it for only two euros, if you buy it along with the admission ticket. As well as the expected info on the museum's collections, it suggests four self-guided architectural tours of the city, with walking and subway instructions, plus, for the lazier, a list of food and drink spots "in high-class architectural ambience." To see every site of architectural significance could have taken weeks. They run from Baroque palaces, through the Modernist and Secessionist movements and up to 80s and 90s deconstructionist rooftops designed by the Vienna-based partnership Coop Himmel(b)lau.

I did, at least, make it to the American Bar, at Kärtner Strasse 10, locally known as the Loos Bar. Designed in 1908 by modernist Adolf Loos, this tiny masterpiece bears a sign on its front door reading "no groups and no sightseeing in our bar." Which means, clearly, that you must go in and order if you want to hang around peering at the joint. Savoring a cocktail along with the stained glass, polished wood, and green leather, I think I achieved my own personal form of gesamtkunstwerk, fusing architectural appreciation and martini consumption into a single artistic experience.

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