Throughout the years, Austrian architecture has always attracted international attention. First and foremost because almost every generation has produced several architects with radical opinions and spectacular projects who almost naturally find a place in the international circle of architectural publications, lectures, competitions, exhibitions, and prizes. However, these architects would never be able to produce the work they do –even if some of their work is realized in other countries – if there weren’t a broad and stable basis for architecture in Austria itself. Austrian architecture is, of course, firmly rooted in a rich history, which, particularly in a city like Vienna, is still alive and markedly present in many buildings one sees and experiences every day. Von Bart Lootsma.

Austrian TransModernity_An Architecture of Synthesis and Restraint

Culture plays an important role in everyday life. Austria, for example, spends three times more money on culture per capita than the Netherlands. It is something public funds as well as municipalities invest in, but so do banks and insurance companies, many of whom have quite interesting art collections and the public galleries in which to present them. This not only concerns Vienna, the capital, but also smaller cities like Salzburg, Bregenz, Linz, and Graz that are well known for their tradition of great festivals. Over the last few decades, the cultural orientation in Austria has shifted from its focus on its own tradition – although this is still studied by many scholars – to become more and more international. This does not only affect the fields of theater, music, and the visual arts, but architecture as well. The exhibition curated by Hans Hollein in the Austrian pavilion at the last Venice Biennial featured internationally famous architects with a wide range of projects that have either been built or are about to be built in various parts of Austria.

But Austrian architecture does not only benefit from a climate that is saturated with culture. Austria was, and to some extent still is, also a typical European welfare state. The level of education is high and the prospect of teaching is still attractive to many famous architects, Austrian and international alike. Public housing and public buildings, like schools for example, are to a large extent funded by the government. Many projects are selected through the competition process, and as there are many good architects in Austria, the field is highly competitive.

All of this produces a lively architectural culture in which there is a broad spectrum of different positions. In an attempt to characterize this field, I put forth the principle of a Lorentz Attractor as all these positions seem to circle around two poles to form a complex linear work. One of these poles represents an emphasis on tradition and continuity and therefore demands a high degree of restraint from the architects that tend to that position. The other stands for modernity. Here architects want to break with traditions in an often violent way, to embrace or even to provoke new conditions. One may say that this model is suitable to describe any architectural constellation, but somehow it seems to fit the Austrian situation more perfectly. Perhaps because the positions that are closer to the modernist pole of the attractor have been so radical since the sixties and have attracted more attention than the others, particularly abroad. What is important to realize is that this is not a dialectical model that in the end would lead to a certain balance, but a model dedicated to extremes. Again, this may be attributed to the circumstance that the more radical architects realized some, or even most, of their work abroad: they never compromised. Their work is scattered all over the world, in the most unexpected places: Mönchengladbach, Madrid, Groningen, Rotterdam, Lyon, Dresden, Lima, New York, Berlin… And even if the subject matter of those works is deeply rooted in Austrian traditions, they have also lost their original meaning. These architects might be called transmodern in the sense that Jean Baudrillard intends when talking about transpolitical figures in Les stratégies fatales: an architecture of excess.1 Indeed, as Friedrich Achleitner remarked back in 1989, postmodern and poststructuralist French thinking was widely acknowledged/assimilated in Austria at a very early stage.(2)

Synthesis

This, however, is not the ”transmodern” Otto Kapfinger had in mind when he curated this exhibition, but rather it is a view that could only be expressed by an outsider. Seen from within Austria, the model remains dialectical and the tension between modernity and tradition has to be solved in everyday life. Traditions are transformed by modernity and modernism in a way that carefully integrates all the good things that are embedded in tradition in a continuous, thoughtful, smooth process. Modernity and modernism are integrated, carefully reflected upon, but hardly ever speeded up or provoked. Indeed, this is a particular quality of Austrian architecture and this attitude has a long tradition that goes back at least to Adolf Loos. But even someone like Otto Neurath, who believed in modernization as an inevitable process, was skeptical and critical about the radicalism of modern architecture as it was proposed, for example, by the Bauhaus. One might even argue that many of the first ”radical” Austrian architects from the sixties, like Hans Hollein, Walter Pichler, and Raimund Abraham, displayed a great interest in history and tradition, an interest that was not just reflected in books and exhibitions, but also had great implications for their later work. This has the effect that the best Austrian architecture is not only highly complex and layered, sometimes to a painstaking degree, but also extremely generous, comfortable, and well made.

In 1991, when I prepared a special issue of Archis about recent Viennese architecture, Hermann Czech, one of the most interesting Viennese architects and theoreticians, urged me not to write that contemporary Austrian architecture began with Architektur, the exhibition curated by Hans Hollein and Walter Pichler in the Galerie nächst St.Stephan in Vienna in 1963.(3) The work displayed there and the manifestoes Hollein and Pichler published are certainly among the most extreme and brutal celebrations of modernity since Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto. This event had the effect of a stone thrown into a quiet pond, and it certainly caused some waves. Austrian radical architecture had its own respected place between Archigram and the Italians. The first generation of radical architects, which also included Raimund Abraham, Carl Pruscha, and Günther Domenig, inspired a whole generation of offices with imaginative names like Coop Himmelblau, Haus-Rucker-Co, Zünd-Up, Salz der Erde, and Missing Link. These collectives worked like rock bands and produced installations and happenings that one did in fact best experience more or less like rock concerts. Today, there is a third wave of young, sometimes very young offices, with names like propeller z, awg_AllesWirdGut, the next ENTERprise, and so on, and this generation, too, organizes events and installations. Most of this work was and is realized in the art world and is produced with an eye to attracting media attention, as Hermann Czech has complained in several articles he wrote as early as the late sixties and early seventies. ”‘Ambiente’ is a word revealing an attitude both unintelligent and false: the arrogance to believe that architecture can save the world, and the modesty to believe that this would be achieved if all corners are rounded off. But it is no good. No architectural product however flexible or inflated can play as important a role as the dome or the rib vault once played. (…) Architecture is not life. Architecture is background. Everything else is not architecture.”(4)

Renovation

Of course, media do play an increasing role in architecture, as in any field of society, and many of the radical Austrian architects from the sixties are producing their most important work now, while some of the younger radical offices are already at a very early age realizing interesting work today. However, during the seventies disappointment increased in Austria over the fact that the radical movement didn’t seem to have had a lasting impact in the built environment, apart from some brilliant but miniscule shop interiors by Hans Hollein. This feeling was expressed by critics like Dietmar Steiner, for example. His text Gebautes ist immer seltener geworden (built architecture is becoming rarer) was not only a melancholic comment about the fact that the sixties had gone out of fashion and so little architecture had been actually realized, but also a plea to focus attention on the most banal things in architecture again, like materials and details.5 Others, like the architect Boris Podrecca, realized that Vienna was, in a way, ”completed” as a city. Vienna was built as the capital and bureaucratic center of an empire that had about 60 million inhabitants in 1914. Today it is the capital of a country with only 8 million inhabitants. There was enough built volume in the city to accommodate new programs and most architectural commissions were renovations and interiors in which a sensitive historical context usually formed the starting point. In the seventies and eighties this situation produced, again in Dietmar Steiner’s words, a ”small and silent” architecture, that consciously connected to Viennese architectural history and theory.

In this context, the issue of what is modern in architecture takes on a totally different and more diffuse character than in most other countries. Of course, Austria did not have a particularly strong modernist architecture in the nineteen twenties and thirties in the first place. In the large housing program of Red Vienna, architects carefully looked for styles that would be recognized by the workers. Many modern architects, like Kiesler, Schindler, Neutra, Frank, and Plischke migrated to the United States, New Zealand, and Sweden. But the fact that until recently most projects were renovations is even more decisive for the particular way recent Austrian architecture deals with modernity and modernism. As was brilliantly formulated by Hermann Czech in an essay on Adolf Loos, ”Inherent in the concept of conversion is (…) a dialectic of two endeavors: preservation and change. Although Loos doesn’t leave any doubt that he looks to the future with a modern eye, the weight of his argumentation rests on preservation. Change is only permissible if it brings with it improvement. Because type and form ‘are the result of the unconscious combined work of all the people of an entire culture’ – ‘the individual person is incapable of creating a form, thus so is the architect’. (…) The essential characteristic of conversion (…) therefore consists in decisions that have already been made. Once one realizes that each design process represents a series of decisions in which later decisions are determined by earlier ones, it no longer makes any real difference whether the earlier decisions are one’s own or somebody else’s. Each design process contains established points which must either be accepted or overturned by subsequent thought processes.”6 This attitude can not only be applied to renovations, but also in a more general way to completely new projects, as they are almost always situated in the historical context of a city or in a sensitive landscape. Besides, the restraint of many architects is not just limited to the context, but also to the interior, as there is the desire to not predetermine the use too much but as far as possible to leave decisions open to the inhabitants and users.

Jabornegg & Pálffy

Jabornegg & Pálffy are typical representatives of this trend in Austrian architecture. They seem to specialize in renovations in complex situations that are as drastic and thorough as they are precise. Several of their works were realized for the art world, such as the Generali Foundation in Vienna, the installation for the documenta X and the alteration of the south wing of the railway station into an art gallery, the latter two both in Kassel. In an essay on museum architecture, they distance themselves from the museum as a work of art in itself and from the museum in which the functional is brought to such a level of perfection that it outshines the art. ”Both positions make it clear that innovation using architecture as its means is essentially restricted, a vocabulary of architecture like all vocabularies is soon exhausted, and in addition to this, it is not even particularly comprehensive. Yet architecture is not dependent upon the continuous innovation of its own means. There also exists the innovation of those aspects which originate in the spectrum of everyday perception. Such innovation aims at escaping from the constantly occurring standardization and automation of processes but, naturally enough, is itself automatic and, at some point, unimportant.”7 Jabornegg & Pálffy refer to the simple innovations they developed for the lighting and ventilation of several projects. In their installation for the documenta, they did not use air conditioners but natural ventilation. Of course, the whole idea behind this is that no one notices it. Also, they developed a simple membrane that is used to diffuse natural light in such a way that one is totally unaware that it is actually a light source. They use it in ceilings and in panels in front of windows and it is totally integrated in the architecture. The inflatable roof above the inner court of the Schoellerbank in Vienna gives the impression that there is no roof at all, that the roof is the air.

Probably more than with any other architect, to Jabornegg & Pálffy architecture is ”background”. The critic Liesbeth Waechter-Böhm even referred to the documenta installation as an ”architecture one does not see”.8 It is an architecture that can never be perceived as an ”object”, but that focuses completely on the organization of space. To some extent, invisibility characterizes the nature of the kind of works Jabornegg & Pálffy have realized. The entrance of the Generali Foundation is the former entrance to the courtyard of a palace from the Gründerzeit, for example: one never sees the exterior of the building. The entrance is only marked by a sign. On the other hand, the commission included new staircases and elevators for the apartments and offices above the exhibition space, which meant a much more rigorous intervention than one would imagine.

The Schoellerbank is completely hidden behind existing façades. But it is not one of the many office buildings in a historical city that just leaves the façades as a hollowed out shell. The solution Jabornegg & Pálffy found, was to leave the first part of the building that is attached to the façades. Only after that they created a new, extended courtyard that has offices on two sides and generous staircases, elevators and bathrooms on the other two. It is a solution that created an entirely new building, which is however integrated with the existing structure in a totally natural way.

The Judenplatz Museum in Vienna is even almost completely underground. This was necessary as the Holocaust monument by Rachel Whiteread is located above the archeological vestiges of a medieval synagogue, which was destroyed in 1420. Because of the nature of Whiteread’s monument, a massive negative imprint of a library, it was impossible to access the ruins from there. Therefore the ruins have been made accessible by means of a tunnel from the Judenplatz Museum in the so-called Misrachi House, where the religious, cultural, and social life of Viennese Jews in the Middle Ages, before they were banned, is shown.
However restrained, the architecture of Jabornegg & Pálffy is never neutral. That is not only because the solutions are so specific, but particularly because of the sequences of spaces one goes through: narrow and wide, high and low, dark and light spaces alternate with each other in such a way that one often has the feeling of going through a ”rite of passage”. Also, the architects make very conscious use of perspectives, but at the same time everything is in the service of the objects on display or the activities taking place.

henke und schreieck

Probably the most outspoken modernists in this exhibition are Dieter Henke and Marta Schreieck. Their buildings celebrate all the achievements of modern architecture: they are light – both in construction as well as literal terms – and transparent, they offer generous plans and open up to the surrounding landscape. As objects, however, they are carefully placed within the surroundings in a way that reminds us of the architecture of the Tendenza. No matter how autonomous and loosely sculptural their projects may appear, every building is first and foremost an act of urban design, creating new relationships by introducing public routes and places and respectfully restructuring the surrounding urban tissue. Even a building like the bauMax, a huge hardware and garden supply store near the Vienna airport, which has been called an UFO and seems to have been designed primarily as a landmark, is an attempt at reorganizing the parking that usually surrounds these places, placing it under the ground and providing an enclosed space for the usually desperate garden center. The extension of a beautiful modernist hotel in Hall by the architect Lois Welzenbacher is only separated from the original building in order to keep it from competing with it and to leave the park behind it open.

All the aforementioned qualities of the work of henke und schreieck are united in their most famous project to date: the Innsbruck School of Social and Economic Sciences. It stands on the site of a former barracks, that used to provide a barrier between the oldest part of Innsbruck and the Hofgarten park. The main building creates an urban backdrop to this park but, because it is elevated from the ground, it also forms a gate to it for people coming from the city. The building itself consists of two tracts with a top-lit atrium in between. One of these tracts makes a sharp rectangular angle to define a new public square on the side of the city. This square is loosely defined on the other side by a separate building containing a management center, which follows the historical street pattern.

Even though the project clearly defines spaces, what is most striking about it is the almost unprecedented openness. This was more or less demanded by the client, who wanted an ”open university” in which a lively interaction between science and practice could take place. The program of the building does not only contain educational facilities, but these are mixed with residences, offices, cafes, and retail spaces. From the atrium, one can look through the building everywhere, even through classrooms and offices. And everywhere one is confronted with the magnificent surroundings of the Alps.

Openness is also characteristic of the Leberberg School in Vienna. Here, this openness is partly the classical openness that has been celebrated so much in modern architecture: the way the corners of the classrooms open up reminds us of Duiker’s open-air school in Amsterdam and Rietveld’s Schröder House in Utrecht. But again this building is also carefully designed as a public building and a center of the new neighborhood. That is already symbolically expressed not only in the glass roof accompanying the entrance, but also in the way henke und schreieck deal with the interior corridors they have turned into meeting places. They remind us of the work of Dutch structuralists such as Herman Hertzberger, but they are much more generous in their nature.

Riegler Riewe

The architecture of Florian Riegler and Roger Riewe has often been misunderstood as one of the many variations of the international minimalist tendency. Indeed, their projects do generally consist of compositions of rectangular bodies and are detailed in an intriguing way, making use of concrete and industrial products that are combined in unusual ways to create subtle, layered effects of transparency and relief. Particularly their early work, like the buildings for the Graz Airport, might give the impression that this is the essence of their work.

But Roger Riewe has always been very clear about it: ”Our architecture is not one of built images. Creating open and yet precise structures, it provides the framework for the complex flux of images of use.”9 In their last book, they emphasize this aspect of their work by presenting their housing projects with photographs by the Dutch photographer Bas Princen, that show the buildings after years of use, almost avoiding the outer appearance and focusing on the way people actually inhabit them.10 Even if the reintroduction of people in architectural representations has become fashionable to a certain degree in the more progressive discourse, these photographs are certainly not flattering for the architecture as an aesthetical phenomenon in itself. In this sense, they certainly fit the tendency in this exhibition to see architecture as a background.

One must keep in mind, however, that Riegler Riewe is the only office in this selection that is not based in Vienna but in Graz. The high importance that the Viennese offices attribute to a historical context, be it the city or an existing building, does not become so manifest in Riegler Riewe’s work, even if the volumes are carefully placed in their context in a way that, again, shows the influence of the Tendenza. Other projects remind the viewer more of structuralism and Team X. In the building complexes for the Institutes of Information Technology and Engineering at the Graz University of Technology these influences come together in an unexpected but harmonious synthesis: in a structure of rectilinear concrete slabs spaces are left open, forming an informal route and interior places within the project.

Particularly in their housing projects it becomes clear that the social aspect comes first. The Tendenza comes to mind again because of the interest Riegler Riewe display in typologies. But a closer look at the plans reveals that these typologies have lost the belief that life will always manifest itself in more or less the same way and develop in tranquility. Quite on the contrary: the ground plans can be inhabited in many different ways and sometimes feature spaces that are almost ambiguous, provoking the inhabitants to make conscious decisions. These in-between spaces are reminiscent of the spaces one can find in projects by Aldo van Eyck and Herman Hertzberger, but there is much more tension in them, like in Rem Koolhaas’ social condensers.

Jabornegg & Pálffy, henke und schreieck, and Riegler Riewe are just a few examples that demonstrate that Austria offers a solid ground for producing architecture of high standards. It is a quality that cannot just be experienced on special occasions; architecture is not limited to a few excellent public buildings that are dedicated to the arts or the government, but it plays a vital role in the quality of everyday life.