Bettina Götz und Richard Manahl, ARTEC Architekten
In: Josef Lackner Architekturforum Tirol (ed.), Anton Pustet Publishing, Salzburg, n.d. (2003)

 

Josef Lackner created buildings that added specific aspects to mod­ernism’s space-making project: with regard to re-defining and sounding out spatial possibilities of a simple geometrical silhouette, little exists that is comparable to his Ursuline school complex in Innsbruck.

 

What makes his architecture fascinating, and at the same time allows our work to profit from it, has to do with his approach – his way of designing was founded on a rigorous framework – a concept: every project adheres to its own set of instructions – and these are never used a second time. The process ties together the buildings and projects with their various, often unwieldy appearance to become one grand oeuvre. He developed his own logic for each project and sub­mitted all further decisions – in some cases, with the exception of material selection – to these rules. This gave rise to buildings that did not adhere to formal wishes or obsessions, but rather whose appearances were generated by the respective concepts.

 

In this way, Lackner set himself apart from the process that was typical of his most prolific period, a process that was conceived of for repeated application and optimized for increased effect in drawing attention to oneself: style. Lackner’s “style” is the concept itself, whereby completely different approaches may be possible depending on the task at hand, the site, and the problem to be addressed. As a consequence his oeuvre is multi-layered and multi-faceted, never slick or boring, but compelling, often surprising, and always decipher­able and explainable. We like Lackner’s idiosyncrasy – one might even call it bizarreness.

 

His thing is space; spatial components are defined and woven into a whole; nothing is residual. The appearance of the spatial configurations in their materialization is often irritating, sometimes difficult to decipher, and the person who takes interest is always rewarded with a wondrous interweavement, that allows an object that had been perceived as stand-offish to become an idiosyncratic yet matter-of-fact figure. A useneutral envelope is never his theme; it’s always about spatial quality – an invention as a response to a general problem.

 

At first glance, on account of their unwieldiness and inelegance, Lackner’s buildings can be irritating, even shocking. Upon closer inspection it becomes clear that these are in fact built concepts that one can decipher and which then, at second glance, derive their beauty
from their coherence. His buildings are the honest result of the underlying principle: an image arises that is at times almost shrill, sometimes seems nonchalant and arbitrary, but that has arisen only through adherence to the project’s foundational design rules.

 

Bettina Götz and Richard Manahl, ARTEC Architekten
Appeared in „Ein Buch für Helmut Richter“ Vienna University of Technology, Faculty of Architecture and Planning, Holzhausen Druck, Vienna, 2007

 

In Vienna at the start of 1980s, Richter who came from Graz, was for us the great role model in Austria.

Instead of post-modernism  Jean Prouvé as an icon.

As a person and an architect Helmut Richter showed us that architecture is a position, not a service (in Wittgenstein’s sense: aesthetic comes from ethic). 

 

His position is located on (and generally beyond) the boundary.

His context is global, the opposite of place-related:

ignoring all the prerequisites in every building project, in order to search for new, unknown combinations generally using simple, industrially influenced components. 

 

Writing about him is a challenge, as in Viennese architecture of the last 20 years he was the challenge per se.

 

 

[1]
“aesthetic organization” is a term that Helmut Richter uses for his work

Bettina Götz, ARTEC Architekten
Lectuer held at the Symposion „Was bleibt von der Grazer Schule?“, TU Graz, 2010

In: Was bleibt von der Grazer Schule? Jovis Verlag, Berlin, 2012

 

This title refers to a text by Helmut Richter in the journal UM BAU on the occasion of the publication of the bathroom he designed for S. Sares.

In it he tells of the “structure of the aesthetic,” which he finds in an “inventive ordering, testing and re-ordering of elements that are not characterized by belonging to certain classes or categories.” Richter continues, “We try to at least do as little wrong as possible; when something is unsightly, it is in fact wrong.” ¹

 

Helmut Richter’s apartment building on Vienna’s noisy Brunner Straße is in many respects a pioneering achievement in social housing – and not only for Vienna.

 

Typology: an open exterior-corridor system that is shielded along the street by the plastically formed glazed facade. This system provides a daylit, semi-public, quasi-extension of street space as path to the apartment door and therefore allows a communication space deserving of the name to come into being.

 

Floor plan typology: a continuation of the so-called Vienna Block, an apartment building type possessing a central light well. Because the exterior corridors are positioned at a distance to the apartments, ensuring that sufficient daylight is available for the main rooms of the apartments to be oriented to it.

 

Technology: the frameless, 160-meter-long glazed facade is the first of its kind in Vienna. The construction method is a specifically modulated, reinforced steel frame. The very slender, space-saving exterior walls were clad in prefabricated, story-high wood elements with fiber-cement board sheathing on the outer face. The development of this prototype cut costs significantly.

 

Richter’s buildings are always prototypical, always testing the limits of what is practicable and possible, which is what makes his work so compelling. Peter Cook calls it “hand-tailored tech.”²

 

While there is something almost compulsively precise about how Helmut Richter conducts himself – there is no situation, no material, no detail that hasn’t been fastidiously specified, nothing is left to chance – his former office partner Heidulf Gerngross is at the other end of the spectrum: here, chaos reigns. He focusses his attention on concepts, and his concepts are patient. His architectural conception is open; everything is in a state of flux.

 

The saying “to make a virtue of a necessity” could very well have been coined by Gerngross. He works in different areas of architecture, in a great variety of constellations, and he does not draw up plans. So he was obliged to invent the “plan of the spoken word,” with plenty of leeway for the inventions of his amigos.

 

And yet: the Gerngross framework remains unmistakable – generous, unexpected, and thereby, stimulatingly fresh and unspent, yet pragmatic and, consequently, an unparalleled housing concept, because it’s the others – the users, clients, etc. – who decide what is possible. He only determines the leeway, for he took leave of the detail years ago.

 

“City planning is interior architecture,” is the way Gerngross puts it. His specific way of sampling with scales, and, of course, also with content, makes him unpredictable, but to an even greater degree, an ingenious architectural inventor.

 

The alliance between these two very special characters, which took the form of an architecture firm, was always a heady mix, so it’s no surprise that they went their separate ways. And yet, it’s impossible to think of one without thinking of the other.

 

1

Helmut Richter: “Bad S. Sares,” in: UM BAU 8 (December 1984), 77–78.

2

Peter Cook: Preface, in: Helmut Richter – Bauten und Projekte / Buildings and Projects, Basel – Boston – Berlin 2000, 6–7.

 

A Commentary by Bettina Götz and Richard Manahl (ARTEC Architekten)
In:  „Werkgruppe Graz. Architecture at the Turn of Late Modernism”, ed. by Eva Guttmann, Gabriele Kaiser, HDA Graz, Park Books, Zurich, 2013

 

As soon as we converse about Graz (where we studied and thus know very well) and the buildings there (which have “accompanied” us ever since), the discussion turns very quickly to the Gothic double spiral staircase in the Graz Castle. But the Terrace House Estate[1] of the Werkgruppe Graz, which is gigantically large in comparison, is also sure to come up in each of these conversations. That is no wonder – both are not simply “buildings,” but rather “structures” whose design principles feature a universality that is applicable far beyond the individual edifice and continue to be essential references for our own work. Observed as such, these buildings are naturally not directly comparable; what is interesting about both, however, is the stringency and rigidity of their basic conception. So it is no wonder that the architects of the Werkgruppe Graz also intensively dealt with the analysis of this staircase prior to their work.

 

The Terrace House Estate was planned and erected over quite a long period of time: between 1966 and 1978. When one considers the situation in Graz during those years, it becomes apparent that the crucial conditions for a further, specific architectural development (the “Graz School”[2]) also arose in this region precisely in the 1960s. A number of extraordinary architectural personalities of different generations worked here on the very same program: urbanity.

This exceptional interest in all types of megastructures is clearly “the” international theme of this era (e.g., Archigram, superstudio…). Here, however, it was surely a natural counter reaction to the basically provincial situation in Graz. In Vienna, the Austrian metropolis to which – seen from Graz – a “critical distance” always existed, one was very gladly and thoroughly concerned at this time with the small(est) form, impressively demonstrated, for example, by Hermann Czech’s Kleines Café (first construction phase in 1970). There was also a rather artistic preoccupation with the large scale, where the projects were not worked through in detail (see, among others, Hans Hollein’s Flugzeugträger in der Landschaft, 1964, photo collage).

 

Two positions particularly strike out in the context of the Terrace House Estate’s time of origin: the Überbauung Ragnitz, 1965–69, by Günther Domenig and Eilfried Huth, and the profound, theoretical examination of “Structuralism”[3] by Bernhard Hafner, still a student at that time.

This generation-spanning work, involving the intellectual student body from the drawing studios of the Graz Technical University and including the respective spontaneous discussions at inns, long was the trademark of the Graz architecture scene. Hafner was interested in “urban architecture,” in the development of an everyday city structure. “It is not about beauty, also not primarily about function, but rather about the separation of the long-term from the short-term. The structure is long-living; it provides the hardware for the expansion, which can be replaced over time. The structuralist never has an end state in mind; every end is the beginning of something new. According to Hafner, that is urban architecture – pluralistic and undetermined. The complexity arises in the interplay of structure and expansion.”^[4]

 

In the 1966/67 exhibition Urban Fiction, held at the Galerie nächst St. Stephan in Vienna, Domenig and Huth presented their project Neue Wohnform Ragnitz, an architectonically detailed megastructure project worked out with a close relation to constructive practice. In a secondary system that serves to house the supply system and create a basic spatial structure, individually customized living elements as well as access routes can be integrated on several levels. “The project for Ragnitz, however, not only settles for the constructive aspects of an urban megastructure, it intends instead to create space in the room structures for a renewed and more flexible society.”[5] In an interview with Gerhard Steixner and Maria Welzig, Günther Domenig says: “The first group that could also have actually built a superstructure in Austria, which was certainly derived from us, was the Werkgruppe Graz with this Terrace House in St. Peter.”[6] However, the Werkgruppe Graz had already begun in 1962 to programmatically concern themselves with housing construction in the scope of a competition entry for a large-scale complex in Innsbruck-Völs. The competition was lost, and the realization of these universally valid contents first succeeded with the Graz Terrace House.

In our view, the architecture of the Terrace House Estate is of lasting effect far beyond zeitgeist and regional significance: a typologically developed large-scale and multi-story housing construction. For us, it is the opposite of the horizontally laid out Gartenstadt Puchenau by Roland Rainer, the icon of Austrian housing construction per se. Today, through the way nature has reshaped them, both are more a part of a landscape than of a building.

The generous opening and the respective common areas, always publicly accessible up to the top floors, have decisively influenced our stance towards housing construction. It was there where we learned that housing construction first becomes usable and urban through the combination of an – also spatially – robust structure and a “corresponding void” as leeway for sustainable, unforeseeable changing and further building.

 

A large number of different apartment typologies are accessible through completely open stairwells (with an elevator), which are connected on the fourth floor by a five-meter-high, spacious “communication level” and feature general leisure areas on the top floor. What is exemplarily realized here is not a “gated community,” but rather the threshold-free usability of public access areas as social meeting spaces of a city structure.

Having gone out of style, so to say, after completion (the time for large-scale structures was over), it took some time until generally undivided appreciation of the Terrace House Estate once again prevailed.

It is also remarkable that this housing conglomerate with 522 apartments resulted from a direct commission – unthinkable today due to the completely altered political attitude and commissioning structures! Not only does the current state of architectural competition hinder a structural urban development, but also the momentarily prevalent (mis)belief that larger heterogeneity and, therefore, “city” can be generated solely through a division into smaller units under complete utilization of the possible maximum density.

 

The major buildings of the Werkgruppe emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in the spirit of a regionally-oriented approach committed to the immediate structure. Werner Hollomey co-founded the Forum Stadtpark in 1960 and planned and carried out the ingeniously simple building (constructed at the lowest cost) for the association – a spatial concept in which exhibitions and events took place at the highest international level over many decades, where culture and life came together in a self-evident manner, until internal quarrels and peculiar additions put an end to it.

In the years between 1970 and 1990, Graz took up a type of vanguard role in Austrian architectural development. In contrast to the solitary figures of Josef Lackner and Othmar Barth in Tyrol, a heterogeneous scene with reciprocal influencing and rejection was at work here. At the beginning of the 1970s, the situation in Graz was still distinctly characterized by Ferdinand Schuster, who had just passed away back then. His late works, influenced by Mies van der Rohe, are spatially and structurally elaborated in an extraordinarily graceful way. With almost archetypically formed technique for the power plant construction for STEWEAG in Graz he had already anticipated the plasticity of the succeeding generation.

 

Back to the Gothic double spiral staircase, the outwardly inconspicuous stairwell addition in the Graz Castle, a small space, a “functional structure” that shows, like a charter carved in stone, the added value architecture can be capable of achieving if it is understood not as a “service provision,” but as a “cultural achievement.” A 1973 visit to the Walfersam school in Kapfenberg, which had just been completed, left a lasting impression. A new, dynamic concept of space spirally connects the levels into an open space in a simple way that still inspires today. Here the staircase concept, duplicated into endless space, classrooms attached to its exterior, is extended by a middle section occupied by functions, pulling the double staircase quasi apart.

 

The basic character of prominent Werkgruppe Graz buildings is monolithic – the material for it is (exposed) concrete. North African mud brick constructions are likewise the reference and the inspiration, as is the structural composition of Le Corbusier’s habitations – at any rate for Hollomey and his teaching at the Technical University. This approach could no longer be maintained after the Oil Crisis of 1973. Multi-layered building envelopes and structural differentiations with material utilization according to need gained acceptance. The completely different design attitude of the Ragnitz structure compared to the materialization in the Terrace House Estate is shown by a small building by Domenig and Huth in the immediate vicinity of the Estate: a single-story apprentices’ center on Hans-Brandstetter-Gasse. Since we were geographically situated exactly between both of these contrary buildings during our studies, the spectrum of this period’s architecture was very present for us. The notion of space, the relation to the surroundings and the construction of the envelope point a way of “plastic materiality” that was consequently developed further, particularly by Domenig.

The Graz Terrace House Estate also needs not shy away from comparison with the international icons of this time (e.g., Robin Hood Garden, 1972, by Allison and Peter Smithson or Habitat 67, 1969, by Moshe Safdie). As constructed reality, it is a prime example, meanwhile 35 years old, of a successful, future-proof experiment of inestimable value for any housing construction research. Experiments are a crucial building block for any further development of architecture. In Austria we are sadly missing them today.

Bettina Götz and Richard Manahl, ARTEC Architekten
Vienna, 2015

 

Remarks on the threatened demolition of an architectural landmark

 

The full impact of architecture can only be experienced in a real building. Josef Lackner’s indoor swimming pool for Paul Flora is spatially unique and a kind of spatial miracle, a  construction with an exceptional impact, which, in a comparable form, cannot be found elsewhere: it offers expansiveness and at the same time protection through the undulating form and the over-dimensioned circular openings in the ceiling.  The space cannot be fully grasped because from the front you cannot see into rear area of the pool, which can only be reached by swimming through the water. An additional aspect of the Flora swimming pool is that Lackner was able to bring these qualities to the fore in an extremely small building. Its continued existence would not occupy much space and the maintenance costs are low. 

 

The indoor swimming pool is a “simple” building , the only structure we can think of which comparably combines a minimized expenditure of means with a maximum spatial impact is the double spiral staircase in the Burg in Graz.

 

The Wüstenrot Foundation in Germany has shown how important spatial creations of modernism can be preserved, restored and made accessible to the public. For the Austrian state a collection of contemporary iconic spaces would be highly suitable as an architectural legacy for the future.    

 

 

Bettina Götz and Richard Manahl, ARTEC Architekten
Vienna,  April 2015
Published on: http://www.loiswelzenbacher.at/?p=327

 

In the 1970s Welzenbacher was little known in Graz. This situation changed dramatically with the comprehensive survey of Austrian architecture undertaken by Friedrich Achleitner, which has corrected the focus in an almost unimaginable way. The freely flowing world of forms in the Heyrovsky House left a lasting impression. Even when we were not yet students Corbusier’s Ronchamp was an icon and to learn that Welzenbacher had anticipated these freedoms in design twenty years earlier was astonishing (with Scharoun he is one of the few pioneers in this area).

 

Looking from the train in Innsbruck the hermetic “Sudhaus” of the Adambräu brewery with its large glass facade is always striking and leads one to speculate about what it might house.  In the case of the strange conical towers of the Tonhalle in Feldkirch, which are no longer in existence, one remained somewhat puzzled. Welzenbacher built a great deal and drew even more. The linked double blocks in the project for the development of the banks of the Schelde in Antwerp from 1933 surfaced again after the war in the form of a proposal for developing the Donaukanal in Vienna. If it had been built, this filigree and forward-looking structures could have become a model with a far-reaching impact. The project for a “Kleinsthaus“ (tiniest house) in Absam near Innsbruck, which was never implemented, represents “architecture” in a nutshell.

 

As an architect on a trip you rarely experience the sudden appearance of a building that you have long known from publications with all its tranquil presence – as regards form, surroundings and function. This, precisely, is what happened while driving through the Salzkammergut region together with Helmut Richter after a prizegiving ceremony, when, having turned off the main road, the Plischke House on Lake Attersee appeared unexpectedly, like a deer seen in a clearing. Or also approaching Innsbruck by plane, when through the window you see a key building by Lackner that you thought had been destroyed – the Ursuline School, in its full splendour.

 

This is how we encountered the house that Lois Welzenbacher designed for Mimi Settari. Up to that point we had completely underestimated it and thought that in photos (as opposed to the plans) it looked “bloated” or “overblown ”. On a slope above the Etschtal valley near Barbian, while walking from three strange churches (three simple churches placed close together become a striking figure, just as doubling the spiral staircase in the castle in Graz creates a splendid space) to the fine mountain hotel by Lanzinger, the “deer in the clearing“ suddenly appeared again when, unexpectedly, the Settari House stood in front of us: a three-dimensionally formed sculpture, peeled out of the light, which has grown out of the topography. Together with its surroundings the house is a created form with an entirely natural, timeless elegance that can be grasped only when seen in reality.

Bettina Götz and Richard Manahl, ARTEC Architekten
Text in the book „Werner Sewing. No more learning from Las Vegas – Stadt, Wohnen oder Themenpark?”, published by Florian Dreher and Christine Hannemann, Spector Books, Leipzig, 2016

 

Werner, whom I met in October 2006,  was one of the first Berliners I got to know when I started working at the University of the Arts in Berlin.

We found each other interesting. Our attention was drawn to Werner who had studied sociology and was an architecture theorist back in 2003 at the 11^th Vienna Architecture Congress in the Architekturzentrum Wien on account of his extremely eloquent and entertaining contribution “future after the avant-garde”, while for him Vienna with its social housing that had decisively influenced urban development since its inception was an important theme.  

Later at a lecture in the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Architektur he made no secret oft he fact that he found the combination of Coop Himmelblau and the European Central Bank “completely crazy”. In his view the interests oft he „young wild ones“ and old banks could only be diametrically opposed: “fun” and “security”, he said, are contradictory. His commentary  on what, in our opinion, is a successful result would greatly interest us…   

His curiosity about all human and social relationships and his interest in architecture led almost inevitably to an increased attention to all developments in the area of housing construction .

 

We have talked a great deal about English housing from the 1950s to the 1980s. During this period in London a number of exemplary housing districts were created, which on the one hand increase the quality of the individual apartment through the development of complex mostly multi-storey housing typologies and which added together  also deliver a new communicative highly urban quality in the circulation zones.

Structuralism, Brutalism and Team Ten were central themes.  Robin Hood Gardens by Peter and Allison Smithson for example, the Golden Lane Estate by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, or the projects by Ernö Goldfinger (e.g. the Trellick Tower) show large-scale housing of a completely new dimension.

 

Combining multi-storey housing typologies with unexpected architectural and spatial qualities and the open spaces allocated to aparatmetns allow a complexity in the housing structure combined with an efficiently minimised but generous circulation structure. 

The concrete utopias oft he 1960s of a new stacked urbanity with vertical streets generate a completely new communal idea of „public“.

A complexity  which today due to the restrictions on the existing building regulations in Germany and Austria is hardly possible today. Precisely now,here newly built, affordable living space represents a central theme and room for architectural experiments and developments are urgently needed, in order to find architecturally valuable, forward looking, robust solutions for the housing question, examining English housing from this time is a valuable resource that has not yet been sufficiently processed. Two-storey or multi-storey housing typologies are today due to the excessive importance given to criteria of barrier freedom are hardly possible at all, although the restriction to single-storey dwelling units   . inevitable restrict  complex combinations and a three dimensional development of the housing buildings. A real impoverishment and simplification oft he urban body is a foreseeable consequence. 

Werner found the buildings of Denys Lasdun on account of their small-parts and their relationship to the existing urban context particularly interesting  .

Through our joint interest above all in social housing which continues to definitively define Vienna as a growing city,  our collaboration in the framework of the Architecture Biennale 2008 . “Housing” was one of my three central themes as Commissionier oft he Austrian Pavilion at this Biennale and  I asked Werner to take a look “ from outside” at the Austrian housing situation. We have noted that Vienna and Berlin, despite how different the cities may seem to each other are astonishing compatible in terms of mentality.

Werner’s favourite quotation ( on the theme of housing) „ „vorne Kuh´damm, hinten Ostsee/ in front the Kürfurstendamm, behind the Baltic (Kurt Tucholsky)  is actually very suitable as a quotation.

In our opinion housing is the quintessential architectural theme about which every arcihtect must have a substantiated approach, whether he has built in this area or not. Today architecture is divided into specific areas to an excessive extent, where thearchitect must prove their competence almost exclusively with completed buildings in the particular area. A complete misunderstanding of the profession!  A fresh, unspoiled viewpoint often bringst he decisive impulses for a further development.  .

To support this hypotheiss in the framework oft he Bienna we chose sevent teams of architects from throughout Austria who Werner visited and interviewed as part of an “Austria Tour”. All these teams -    Maria Flöckner und Hermann Schnöll in Salzburg, henke und schreieck Architekten in Vienna, Jabornegg & Pálffy in Vienna, Marte.Marte Architekten in Vorarlberg, Wolfgang Pöschl in Tyrol, Riegler Riewe Architekten in Styria and Gerhard Steixner in Vienna -  have carried out important buildings but not in the area of social housing in Vienna .

In this way through Werner’s exceptional gifts in the area of language and as presenter a lively, refreshing show of stimulating and very different opinions on this theme was created..

The international conference „Residential Building As Motivation“  which we organised in the context of Biennale contribution on 03 und 04. October in the Austrian Pavilion in Venice was brilliantly hosted by Werner, But because or so it seems to me, Werner places the spoken word on, at least, the same level as the written word, if indeed not somewhat higher, in the publication accompanying the conference there isno contribution by him about the presentation or the discussion. His  presentation of our „Abstract City“ conference „Urbanes Hausen“, developed in the context of my work teaching at teh University of Arts in Berlin  and organised in collaboration with the Aedes Network Campus and the City of Vienna in May 2010 in Berlin does not exist in written form   .

But perhaps that is all a really good thing- his  thinking and speaking was always in the future!