AUSTRIA

Despite enduring the disruption of two world wars and decades of political, social, and
economic turmoil, Austria has been among the most fertile centers of 20th-century
architecture. From Otto Wagner at the beginning of the century to Co-op Himmelb(l)au at
its end, Austrian architects have often been at the forefront of the struggle to confront the
rapidly changing dictates of the modern age. Those efforts have been marked less by
technical innovation than in many other countries—until recently Austria’s building
industries lagged behind those of most other European nations—but rather by a
remarkable openness to new forms and ideas. On the one hand, modern Austrian
architecture has been characterized by a strong inclination to embrace novelty, to
originate and develop innovative expressions. But Austrian architects have also exhibited
exceptional skill in manipulating and re-using elements from the past, engaging, in the
process, in a sophisticated dialogue with history. In the works of many of the best
Austrian architects, these two tendencies have been combined to yield designs of unusual
power and expressiveness. Often the results have been quite distinctive: the works of
figures like Adolf Loos or Gustav Peichl remain uniquely individual and parochial, even
while they have drawn worldwide attention. And when Austrian architects have followed
wider tendencies, their works nonetheless frequently show original adaptations to culture
and place.
The origins of 20th-century Austrian architecture stem in great part from Otto Wagner.
In his roles as practitioner, revolutionary, and teacher, Wagner inaugurated the headlong
search for the new. His call for an architecture suited to “modern life” and “new materials
and the demands of the present” proved decisive in shaping the distinctive look of the
Viennese Moderne at the beginning of the century. Yet Wagner, like many of those who came
after him, never fully abandoned the past; even his most spare works are redolent of
Austria’s rich building history, especially its legacy from the Renaissance and the
Baroque. Early on, Wagner developed a new form language that mixed freely the
curvilinear lines of the Art Nouveau (Jugendstil) with classical features, compositional
strategies, and planning. By 1904, however, he had begun to pursue a more rectilinear,
abstract style that brought together elements of the old and new. The resulting fusion of
the classical and the modern characterized his most famous works, including the Postal
Savings Bank (1904–05) and the Church am Steinhof (1902–07).
Wagner’s many protégés and followers, although often tracing their own special paths,
continued to investigate the possibilities of innovation and historical revivalism. Joseph
Maria Olbrich, who worked in Wagner’s atelier around the turn of the century, sought a
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new architectonic ideal in the florid lines and patterning of the Jugendstil. But Olbrich
was simultaneously drawn to archaic, Asian, and Near Eastern motifs, resulting in a
discernible note of exoticism in his designs, a tendency that has reappeared in the works
of many later Austrian architects. Josef Hoffmann, another of the architects who was
influenced by Wagner, sought to foster a new idiom from the language of rectilinear
geometry: the Quatrats til—the square style—that Hoffmann pioneered along with the graphic artist
and designer Koloman Moser, became the most widely admired—and imitated—images
of early Austrian modernism. Yet Hoffmann, after his brief flirtation with a geometric
purism, returned to employing elements from former times, experimenting at various
times with the Biedermeier, Baroque, Rococo, folk art, and Anglo-American traditions.
Many of Wagner’s former students from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, among
them Hubert Gessner, Franz Gesser, Karl Ehn, and Rudolf Perco, adopted this same
approach in the 1920s and 1930s, combining features of Wagner’s modernized classicism
and other historical imagery.
A parallel, but equally important strain of Viennese modernism is descended from
Adolf Loos. During the early years of the 20th century, Loos formulated an alternative
vision of modern architecture based on his own idiosyncratic ideas of culture and form.
He rejected the Jugendstil as contrived and inappropriate, calling instead for an
architecture that would reflect honestly the inherent modernity he found in contemporary
urban life. This approach led Loos toward a new architecture of complexity and pluralism
most brilliantly expressed in his Goldman and Salatsch store on the Michaelerplatz in
Vienna (1910–11). Loos’s renunciation of the notion of a universal modern style was also
embraced by a number of Vienna’s younger generation of modernists, most notably
Oskar Strnad and Josef Frank, who in the years prior to 1914 developed their own
progressive critique of the Viennese Moderne.
The implications of Loos’s ideas extended beyond traditional concepts of style.
Inspired by the linguistic and ethical writings of his friend Karl Kraus, Loos sought to
establish a modern architectonic language that would articulate his notions of propriety
and civility without sacrificing older conventions of material comfort. In his Goldman
and Salatsch Building, Loos also began to investigate a new spatial idea, the Raumplan, or
spaceplan, a system of interlocking rooms on multiple levels. In a series of later designs,
most notably the Moeller (1927–28) and Müller (1929–30) houses, he raised the Raumplan
concept to a high art, creating some of the most extraordinary spatial assemblages of the
modern era. Both of these notions—the concept of linguistic “appropriateness” and the
idea of intricate spatial play—exerted a strong influence on Loos’s followers and later
Austrian architects, including the philosopher-builder Ludwig Wittgenstein, Josef Frank,
and Hermann Czech.
World War I marked a caesura in the development of Austrian architecture. After
1918 the prosperity and stability of the prewar years gave way to a long period of
economic hardship and political uncertainty that ended only after 1945. Vienna, which
before the war had been the capital of an empire of 60 million inhabitants, was reduced to
a provincial city in a country of barely 6 million. The centerpiece of Austrian building
activity in the interwar years was a massive program launched by the Social Democratic
municipal government in Vienna to combat the city’s severe postwar housing shortage. In
contrast to similar housing programs in Germany and the Netherlands, however, the
Viennese experimented little with new construction technologies, relying instead on
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conventional, labor-intensive building practices as a means of ensuring employment for
as many workers as possible.
With few exceptions, the Austrians of the interwar years also showed a decided
aversion to the modernist purism of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus. The vast majority of
the Vienna communal housing projects were the work of the former Wagner students,
and their buildings, like Karl Ehn’s massive Karl-Marx-Hof (1926–30), reflected older,
traditional ideas of massing and composition. Even those architects like Ernst Lichtblau
and Walter Sobotka who subscribed to the general ideas of the Modern movement
exhibited a notable tendency in the 1920s and early 1930s to introduce historical forms
and complex patterning into their designs.
Among the few Austrians of the interwar period who conformed to tenets of the socalled
International Style were Ernst Plischke, Lois Welzenbacher, and Richard Neutra.
Plischke’s Liesing Labor Office in Vienna (1930–32) and Welzenbacher’s Turmhotel
Seeber in Solbad Hall (1930–31) both brilliantly encapsulated the best features of the
functionalist idiom, but neither architect was able to realize more than a handful of
works. Far more successful was the young Neutra, who immigrated to the United States
in the early 1920s and settled in California where he practiced for a time with Rudolph
M. Schindler, another Viennese-trained modernist. Together with Frederick Kiesler, who
moved to New York in the mid-1920s, the three architects would have a decisive impact
on American modern design, but their work exerted little, if any, influence in their
homeland.
The period between 1933 and 1938 formed the second major break in the history of
20th-century Austrian architecture. With the rise of the conservative Austrian clerical
party and the later German annexation of Austria, many of the country’s leading
architects were forced to flee. Josef Frank moved to Sweden and Clemens Holzmeister to
Turkey, but the majority of Austrian exiles—among them Felix Augenfeld, Victor Gruen,
Ernst Lichtblau, and Bernard Rudofsky—sought refuge in the United States. Very few of
these exiles returned to Austria after 1945, depriving the country of some of its best
architectural talent.
The arduous task of rebuilding Austria after World War II fell to a small group of
mostly middle-aged architects who had been trained in the 1920s and 1930s. The most
significant of these figures were Holzmeister, who promoted an older, traditional, and
popular approach; Oswald Haerdtl, Hoffmann’s former assistant, whose buildings and
interiors carried on the tradition of a distinctive Austrian modernism; and Roland Rainer,
who developed a rational, decidedly antihistoricist architectural idiom. But it was a new
generation, most of whom had been students of Holzmeister at the Vienna Academy of
Fine Arts, including Friedrich Achleitner, Johann Gsteu, Hans Hollein, Wilhelm
Holzbauer, Friedrich Kurrent, Josef Lackner, Gustav Peichl, Anton Schweighofer, and
Johannes Spalt, who took the lead in shaping the direction of Austrian architecture after
the late 1950s. Gsteu, Holzbauer, Peichl, and the others sought to reestablish the links
with Austria’s prewar modernist tradition while at the same time responding to
contemporary trends abroad. The result was a more resolutely modernist and
constructivist architecture, one that for the first time began to explore fully the
possibilities of the newest construction methods. Also important in this development was
Karl Schwanzer, whose Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts (1959–62) and Philips Building
(1962–64) were widely admired.
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In the midst of this fascination with technology and tectonics, Hollein, in his Retti
Candle Shop (1964–65) and subsequent works, demonstrated a renewed interest in
aestheticism, one that pointed firmly in the direction of Postmodernism. Like Holzmeister
before him, Hollein probed the potential of symbolism and representation, articulated not
only in formal terms, but also through materials and space. Other Austrian architects of
the 1960s, among them Haus-Rucker-Co (Laurids Ortner, Manfred Ortner, and Günther
Zamp), Co-op Himmelb(l)au (Wolf D.Prix and Helmut Swiczinsky), and Missing Link
(Adolf Krischanitz, Angela Heiterer, and Otto Kapfinger), rebelled against the avantgarde
of the previous decade, seeking to substitute a new architecture—visionary,
dynamic, and socially responsive—in the place of the dominant modernist
monumentalism of the time.
By the 1970s, the works of both the old and the new avantgarde began to attract
worldwide attention. Many of the old avant-garde—including Gsteu, Hollein, Kurrent,
Lackner, Peichl, and Spalt—received academic appointments, and both groups found
increasing numbers of commissions in Austria and abroad. Their position was challenged
in the mid-1970s by two new movements that arose outside Vienna, the Vorarlberger
Baukünstler (Vorarlberg architect-builders) and the Grazer Schule (Graz School). The
former, concentrated in Bregenz near the border with Switzerland and represented by
Carlo Baumschlager, Dietmar Eberle, Roland Gnaiger, and Hermann Kaufmann, stressed
structural refinement and clear tectonic expression; the Graz School, led by Günther
Domenig, Volker Giencke, and Klaus Kada, took an almost diametrically opposite
approach, emphasizing the organic and expressive aspects of building.
The designs of the Vorarlberger Baukünstler, in spite of their use of regional, Alpine
elements, followed the broader development of late modernism. The work of the Graz
School, on the other hand, suggested a much more radical reinterpretation of 20th-century
architecture, at once nervous, irrational, complex, and sometimes even disturbing. Forged
at a moment when the faith in modernism had been broken, the architects of the Graz
School and their counterparts in Vienna, including Coop Himmelb(l)au and Helmut
Richter, challenged conventional notions of functionality, compositional form, and spatial
enclosure. Domenig’s Zentralsparkasse branch bank in the Favoriten section of Vienna
(1975–79), perhaps the most significant example of the early phase of the Graz School,
proffered a trembling assemblage of forms, evoking allusions to biomorphism. The more
recent works of Giencke, Kada, and the others evince this same interest in visual
dynamism, but add to it a greater formal and geometric complexity. Coop
Himmelb(l)au’s Falkenstrasse Roof Construction Project in Vienna (1983–88), among
the most celebrated Austrian designs of the last two decades, introduced not only a potent
construction-based aesthetic, but also a novel kind of space that is both challenging and
inspiring.
Austria in the 1990s presented an unusually rich and diverse architectural scene. At
one extreme were the buildings of Rob Krier, Heinz Tesar, and Hans Hollein, which
sought to reintroduce historical concepts and forms into the contemporary discourse
about urbanism and place. Hollein’s Haas House in Vienna (1985–90), among the most
controversial buildings of the era, demonstrated the long-standing Austrian attitude
toward combining and blending varied elements of the past and present. Hermann Czech
and Gustav Peichl, by contrast, made more specific allusions to the past, drawing in
particular from the early Austrian Moderne. Others, like Wilhelm Holzbauer, Adolf Krischanitz,
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and Boris Podrecca, worked more or less within the codes of late modernism, albeit also
with occasional backward glances. Younger architects, such as Florian Riegler and Roger
Riewe, designers of the Graz Airport (1992–94), sought to frame a new austerity within
the wrappings of technology. At the same time, Ortner & Ortner, Coop Himmelb(l)au,
Völker Giencke, Klaus Kada, Helmut Richter, and their followers continued to challenge
the old orthodoxies, even while their buildings had become firmly positioned within the
mainstream.