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Title:
Austrian phenomenon

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$140.00
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Summary:
In the Austria of the 1960s, the visionary designs of architects and artists garnered international attention. Described as the "Austrian phenomenon," these projects and installations contained the concentrated creativity of the Austrian architectural neo-avant-garde between 1956 and 1973. In Vienna, these avant-garde dreams came to be symbolized by Hans Hollein’s Retti Candle Shop and Hermann Czech’s many cafés and bars, which are still successful today, including the Kleines Café (Little Café), Wunderbar, and Salzamt. The best-known protagonists of this scene include Hans Hollein, Walter Pichler, Raimund Abraham, Coop Himmelblau, Haus-Rucker-Co, Missing Link, and others. The book consists of two parts. The first contains "Documentation" of important publications from the years 1958–1973 in international trade journals like Archigram, Domus, Architectural Record, and Casabella, in which the young architects sought attention for their programs. The second is "Reconstruction," a cross-section of images and texts from publications on the "Austrian phenomenon," elucidated and situated in the context of international architectural history by authors such as Friedrich Achleitner, Bart Lootsma, Stanislaus von Moos, Joseph Rykwert, Anthony Vidler, and others.

Title:
Hollein calling: Architectural dialogues

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$60.00
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Summary:
Hans Hollein (1934–2014), Austria’s only Pritzker Prize laureate and a self-proclaimed avant-gardist of the 1960s, was a meticulous curator of his own work throughout his life. At the same time, the reception of this work was often overshadowed by Hollein’s immense personality. "Hollein calling: Architectural dialogues" explores the Hollein phenomenon from a contemporary perspective. In dialogue with the positions of a younger generation, this book revaluates and brings back into the current discourse Hollein’s thinking and designs. The first part offers interviews with fifteen European firms in which they talk about their relationship to Hollein and his oeuvre, ranging from profound knowledge or selective admiration of specific aspects to skepticism and criticism. Topics such as cultural identity, visual worlds, design tools, and architecture as an independent cultural production run as a thread through these conversations. The second part features a selection of Hollein’s buildings through sketches, models, photographs, prototypes, and documents from the Archive Hans Hollein, Az W and MAK, Vienna—many of which are published here for the first time—as well as new contextualizing texts. The two sections are connected by a grid of key terms formed from pertinent texts and images.

Title:
Hot questions - Cold storage: Architecture from Austria. The permanent exhibition at the Az W

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$85.00
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Summary:
The new permanent display of Architekturzentrum Wien’s (Az W) collection is a milestone in the presentation of architecture and its social dimensions. ''Hot questions—cold storage'' is published alongside this comprehensive exhibition on Austrian architecture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, featuring color images of all exhibits, concise texts, and thematic essays. This book reexamines the country’s architectural culture of the last 150 years, situating it in its cultural, social, and political contexts. Each chapter is prefaced by a question, asking, for example, about the impact of capitalism on our cities and villages or about the contribution architecture can make to our survival on the planet. These ''Hot questions'' bring to life the ''Cold storage''—the silent repository of the collection’s holdings. This book offers a multi-perspective narrative that presents Austria’s building history with all the developments, ideologies, and institutions it comprises. The social relevance of objects and documents is revealed through questioning and visualization, in connecting research and the museum’s mission to collect.