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Architect, Austria and United States

 

The Austrian-born architect Raimund Abraham has played an influential role in architectural discourse and education over the last four decades. His challenging oeuvre of unbuilt work, consisting almost entirely of seductive architectural renderings, delineates a complex architectural position revolving around subversion, metaphor, and a fascination with archetypal forms. His recently completed high-rise in Manhattan for the Austrian Cultural Institute is the most recognizable of a portfolio of built work that has brought together many of the philosophical themes that have preoccupied this enigmatic architect over a prolonged period.

 

Raimund Abraham was born in Lienz, Austria, in 1933 and was educated at the Technical University in Graz, graduating in 1958. In the early sixties Abraham followed in the footsteps of avant-garde groups such as Archigram, the Metabolists, and fellow Austrians Coop Himmelb(l)au in offering proposals for technology-driven Utopias providing modular living environments capable of embodying the future requirements of civilization. In these early projects, Abraham imagined cellular capsules that would be inserted into vast organic communities comprising monolithic megastructures and colossal bridges. These early idealistic visions demonstrated Abraham’s mastery of drawing and collage that would suffuse his later work.

 

In 1964 Abraham moved to the United States to further a career in architectural education, taking up a position as assistant professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. Since 1971 Abraham has been involved in education at a range of major international universities, holding professorships at the Cooper Union, the Pratt Institute, and the graduate schools of Yale and Harvard. In 30 years of academic life, he has also held visiting professorships at the University of California, Los Angeles; the Architectural Association; and various other North American and European universities.

 

Abraham’s attitude to education, and his architectural practice, is subversive, and his position is often critical of the architectural establishment and its compliance with the principles of modern architecture. Abraham sees in modern architectural discourse a rupture with history that has prevented architects from understanding completely the elemental process of architecture. For Abraham, the 20th-century preoccupation with fashion and style has prevented a thorough understanding of the principles of building and the clarity of thought that they demand. Abraham urges a return to the a priori principles of construction concerned with the nature of materials, site, and program. Abraham posits architectural drawing as an equivalent means of expression, where the paper becomes a site for the poetry of architecture. The intellectual act of building surpasses the ultimate physical product. For Abraham, built architecture is often endemic to the forces of compromise.

 

Throughout the 1970s, Abraham galvanized his theoretical position by undertaking an extensive series of unbuilt houses concerned primarily with Heidegger’s notion of dwelling. Abraham maintains that “collision” is the “ontological basis of architecture,” offering as an example the horizon as the most basic junction between the earth and the sky. Abraham defines the process of architecture as either digging into the earth, or reach-ing for the sky—all building is intrinsically related to these primordial elements. These elements become central to many of Abraham’s designs of the period, such as House for the Sun and House with Two Horizons. The abstract house designs sought to strip architecture down to its most essential state, arranging architectonic elements within a formal language of rectilinear forms often embedded within the topology of a generic natural site. Presented largely in rendered axonometric projection, the designs crystallized complex theoretical principles into simple spatial meditations, as is evidenced by titles such as House without Rooms, House with Three Walls, and House for Euclid.

 

In the 1980s Abraham’s attention turned toward monuments, concentrating on historic European centers such as Venice, Berlin, and Paris. Abraham’s unbuilt projects from this period interweave themes of juxtaposition and subversion to arrive at a new monumentality capable of questioning the historical significance of architectural form. The instability inherent in Abraham’s immersion within the historical landscape is most evident in his projects for the city of Venice, the Les Halles Redevelopment in Paris, and the competition entry for the New Acropolis Museum in Athens (for which he was short-listed).

 

One of the most poignant projects from this period is the Monument to a Fallen Building, completed in 1980. The project commemorates the collapse of the Berlin Congress Hall in the same year, proposing a prism-like vault in which traces of the former structure are symbolically revealed. Similar themes are inherent in his 1981 project for a Monument to the Absence of the Painting Guernica, which mourns the loss of Picasso’s masterpiece from its provincial base to another larger museum in Spain. Abraham also addresses the issue of ownership in his project of 1982 for a monumental church that would straddle the Berlin Wall, bringing a transcendental spirituality to the contested space of the wall. All of Abraham’s projects from this period deeply question the foundations of architecture and languish after a lost or forgotten meaning in architectural discourse.

 

As well as his portfolio of unbuilt work, Abraham has also contributed important buildings both in America and in his homeland of Austria. These include individual houses, low-cost housing, and several commercial buildings. The completed buildings demonstrate a fascination similar to his unbuilt work, using archetypal forms, layering, and concision to question conventional architectural form.

 

In 1988 Abraham was runner-up to Daniel Libeskind in the competition for the extension to the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Two years later, he successfully won the commission to build the New Austrian Cultural Institute in Manhattan (other nominees included Hans Hollein and Coop Himmelb(l)au). The recently completed 20-story tower rises in the shape of a dramatic wedge from a narrow and heavily constrained site obscured almost entirely by neighboring buildings. The front facade is layered with a sloping curtain of cascading planes of glass punctuated by solid elements. Celebrating the link between earth and sky, the powerful form of the tower and the heavy plinth of the podium reinforces Abraham’s intention to return architecture to its most basic and primeval elements.

 

Abraham’s challenging and often confronting work occupies an important place within architectural discourse, fostering principles of resistance and legislating against mediocrity. His attempts to return architecture to its philosophical origins in both built and unbuilt projects are intrinsic of a position that attempts to blend the disparate forces of philosophy, poetry, and architecture.

 

 

Selected Works

 

New Austrian Cultural Institute in Manhattan, New York City, United States, 2002

 

 

raketenstation hombroich, neuss, germany