Departing from the thesis that it is possible to regenerate architecture by interpreting common programmes in surprising ways, the exhibition presents the architectural principles and content of three different outsider positions.
architect and professor at the TU Innsbruck. Five selected built works show the development of architecture as a result ofconsistently applied conceptual logic.
Michael Hofstätter (born in 1953), Wolfgang Pauzenberger (born in 1959)
Their programmatic approach makes it clear that architecture is not the mere provision of a service but instead must contribute long-term added value to society.
Residential building is becoming more and more the focus of attention in international architecture discourse. Vienna in particular defines itself on an urban development level through the sheer building volume dedicated to social housing. With the necessary outsider's perspective, Werner Sewing (architectural sociologist and theorist, Berlin) explores the potential of residential building as a motivation for architecture using Austria as a case study. To supplement this programme, an international conference on the subject of residential building will be held at the Austrian Pavilion in Venice from October 3 to 4, 2008.
Ideas should define our actions. Architecture expresses ideas - however, these are often absent, and one builds anyway. In this case the best idea would be not to build.
Josef Lackner's demands on architecture as well as on his contemporaries was marked by an uncompromising and consistent attitude. In his life and work everything revolved around the essential. Many of his buildings are statements on the theme of architecture, basic statements about the client's brief and the realized concepts. From this point of view, Lackner was a fundamentalist who with irony and aplomb strove in the face of the spirit of the times to address architecture itself and consciously swim against the current of the dominant aesthetics. In this way he also influenced many architects, both as an instructor and through his work. His buildings are characterized by their austere charm, subtle intelligence, and often symbolic presence. What he despised most was thoughtlessness and superficiality, he shunned fashion trends and by virtue of his individuality always challenged the system, whether that system was architecture or society.
From Josef Lackner: 11 zufällige Schlagworte, in: Architekturforum Tirol (Hg.): Josef Lackner. 1931-2000
Verlag Anton Pustet, Salzburg 2003
...in architecture, form itself is inconceivable, limiting oneself to formal-aesthetic studies inefficient. If one takes the problems of the present seriously, inventions become imperative, one must strive to create new realities.
...our only stipulation for our work is that it contains an aspect of necessity, but also of foreignness - and that these are present to a degree that corresponds to reality.
...contrasts are preferable to artificial harmony, should the inevitable relationship between form and function demand such a decision.
...our work is an experiment in three-dimensional logic which produces implicating fields of tension and intensities. With the conception of buildings this is achieved via the incorporation of 'implied volumes. Closed, precisely determined areas for protected or private uses - unmistakably and clearly proportioned volumes - are superimposed on functionally underdetermined but, architectonically speaking, precisely calculated empty spaces which can be adapted to the constantly changing living conditions of the city. Structurally what is aimed for is the creation of a spatial relation between the individual and the collective.
Werner Sewing
Our housing demands are changing drastically.
Residential building, however, has long since stopped serving as a motivation for innovative architecture, thus new impulses for a creative way of addressing our housing needs are way overdue.
As opposed to decades of unchecked building in rural areas, Austria, with its considerable state housing subsidies, could make residential building the basis for urban planning and urban renewal and the foundation of a new city architecture.
New lifestyles and environments, the aging of society, a new balance between work and leisure and the higher expectations placed on the living environment that come with it, the renaissance, and - both in Vienna and Styria - the growth of the city and the concomitant decline in population, as well as a crisis of the city centres, like in the small towns of Tyrol - all these contradictory trends demand new architectural
answers. Or they urge us to reassess forgotten experiments and prototypes that have been unjustly disregarded.
In seven interviews, Austrian architects develop conceptual answers to this challenge and demonstrate them in their buildings.
Werner Sewing, Dr. (born in 1951)
Übersetzungen: Kimi Lum
www.artec-architekten.at
