Achtung Architektur!

"Beware Architecture!" Architecture that entails surprise, even danger, is the subject of this exciting discourse on a body of work that has gained increasing international attention since the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Graz and Vienna came to represent the radical edge of European architecture. Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen looks at how this architecture tests the limits of the modern tradition, bringing to light work that is little known yet extremely consequential for contemporary theoretical discourse.Forged in a rarified architectural climate dominated by postwar Marxist-Freudian trends, the Austrian avant-garde challenges the traditional paradigms of objecthood, compositional form, programmic functionality, and spatial closure, emphasizing the fictional and the fantastic embodied in the more peripheral notions within the modern tradition: glass, ornament, machine mysticism, and the organic gestural line.Pelkonen moves between a solid analysis of individual works of architects and firms such as Volker Giencke, Gnter Domenig, Klaus Kada, Helmut Richter, COOP Himmelblau, and Haus-Rucker-Co, and others, and their historical and cultural contexts: philosophical debates on Heidegger, Bloch, Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, and Giorgio Agamben; and the postwar debate on the avant-garde through the works of Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Francis Bacon, and the Wiener Aktionisten.