Achtung Architektur! Image and Phantasm in Contemporary Austrian Architecture [Hardcover]

Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 3, 1996 | ISBN-10: 0262161591 | ISBN-13: 978-0262161596

"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, Günter 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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Pelkonen's text leaves no doubt that Austria's contribution to post-war architecture and discourse lives liminally and radically, and that Graz is the place to go to rediscover architecture's lost sense of adventure and innocence. This book reminds us that architecture—in order to be engaged—calls first for a state of mind. Pelkonen presents hers with brave analogies, critical charm, and elegant ghost-discourses." Roger Connah, Architectural Historian

"Really good work should make a scholar just a bit jealous. Pelkonen's work has that quality. Here is a fresh voice; she has something important to say and does so with conviction and authority. Pelkonen brings to her discussion an extraordinary command of the presupposed artistic and intellectual climate. I know of no book that quite does what she here succeeds in doing." Karsten Harries, Professor of Philosophy, Yale University

About the Author

Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen teaches architectural design and theory at the Yale School of Architecture and at Tampere University of Technology in Finland. From 1988 to 1992 she lived in Graz, Austria collaborating wih Volker Giencke, whose work occupies a central position in this book.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 203 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (June 3, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262161591
• ISBN-13: 978-0262161596
• Product Dimensions: 11.4 x 7.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,070,762 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars 2 books in one, July 13, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Achtung Architektur! Image and Phantasm in Contemporary Austrian Architecture (Hardcover)

This book will deceive: indeed, it would easily be passed over as simply a mongraph on certain examples from contemporary Austrian architecture... and there are oh so many mongraphs, the vast majority being beautiful picture books. Such an approach may well indeed be the most suitable format for conveying the materiality of architecture. But this book is different. The author is attempting to create a 'setting' - actually a causal explanation - for the architecture she presents, to see how it is part of the society within which it is both a product and further influence. As such, then, there lies a deep problem; for as much as her 'theory' is plausible, the architecture does not follow. Indeed, the architecture seems sadly fashionable and whimsical. As such, then, the picture she paints is suspect, not to mention normative. The logic is working in reverse: ie. "This architecture 'succeeds' and here is why".

Nevertheless, this book is worth buying just for the theoretical discussion. The Austrian avant-garde can be put aside.