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Achtung Architektur! Image and Phantasm in Contemporary Austrian Architecture

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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.