Innovative Austrian Architecture

Architectural Review, The, April, 1997 by Peter Blundell Jones

Biswas's catalogue alternates surveys of projects according to various headings - 'interventions', 'cultural buildings', 'residential buildings', 'ecological buildings' etc - with a series of essays by himself and various others, again many of them outsiders. The buildings and projects shown will excite many readers, and if the idea was to impress the rest of the word that the current Austrian scene is worth studying, it will succeed. But there is in most cases simply not enough information. Often it is impossible to envisage the context, and hard to imagine how the buildings are inhabited or built. Intentional or not, such limited coverage encourages a view in terms of form or style. In the age of the sound-bite and the fashion spread this tendency is only too easily indulged.

There is value in the essays, but they seem to have been produced independently and do not read as a coherent whole. The editor's contributions are not the strongest, for he writes generally, making references and connections you might expect Without producing a clear or memorable picture: perhaps it is still too early. What a pity that he did not adopt the critical apparatus suggested in Bruno Zevi's short contribution and then left high and dry. The most memorable piece for me, perhaps because it tussles with some larger ideas, was Michael Sorkin's in the Urban Design section. He touches on Vienna's psychoanalytical heritage, discusses the work of the unmentionable (why?) Hundertwasser, and suggests a promising historical dialectic stemming from the opposition between Sitte's ideal of the grown town and Wagner's classical geometry. I suspect the book worked better as a catalogue.

The fact that none of Volker Giencke's work is included in Biswas's catalogue, though MIT Press have seen fit to publish a book devoted largely to it, indicates the myopic rivalry between Vienna and Graz. The internationally known Szyszkowitz/Kowalski are also missing.

Eeva Pelkonen's Achtung Architektur! is not a standard monograph however: it attempts more ambitiously to erect a general theory about the current state of architecture. It is not exclusively about Giencke, for she also touches on the work of Klaus Kada, Helmut Richter, Coop Himmelblau, Haus Rucker Co and various other artists.

Pelkonen develops her theory around an early work: the temporary Red Stage used for the cultural event Styrian Autumn in 1984. Set in a square backing onto the steep cliff of the Schlossberg, it framed performances with a stepped platform and a huge backdrop of red fabric on high-jump poles. This three-storey red flag could stand upright or be tensioned to curve forward, becoming at once shelter and acoustic reflector, acting also as a kinetic sculpture. Pelkonen dubs it a revolutionary work because it nods at function yet is largely sign, depends utterly on the context yet contrasts with it, and also focuses the ritual without monumentalising it. Being a temporary work it intensifies the notion of architecture as event. She claims that it 'manipulates perception' in a way that makes the 'rediscovery or reinvention of architecture possible'. There are some acute observations here, but perhaps too much is hung on one small peg, for Pelkonen constructs an enormous intellectual edifice with reference to a familiar list of current cultural heroes: Artaud, Breton, Heidegger, Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Godard, Cacciari, Bloch, Benjamin, Agamben, just to mention the supporting cast of this one chapter. Giedion and Frampton are also invoked so that their distance from the new interpretation can be defined.

In subsequent chapters Giencke's main works are tied to the developing theme, which embraces great twentieth-century topics such as the myth of glass, the myth of the machine, organicism, aperspectivity and more. Pelkonen is most authoritative when close to the work, and the work is certainly worth the effort. It is a pity that the articulate Giencke is not more often quoted in person, and that coverage of his working methods, which Pelkonen is uniquely qualified to describe, is not fuller. My main reservation, though, is the earnestness with which the grand theory is set out, as if to take or leave. You can be sympathetic without feeling able to swallow the whole. I also found it hard to dispel the impression that it was less historical analysis than alibi making, intellectual justification by connection to the right heroes. If the work is good enough, it hardly needs such legitimation, while if the ideas are good enough their pedigree need only be quietly footnoted. Pelkonen has not achieved a new historical paradigm, but her book is a must for those wanting to know more about the contemporary Austrian scene.