In the End: Architecture – Journeys through Time (1959 – 2019)

While in Vienna, Austria a visit at the Architekturzentrum Wien is always a great idea to meet local architects and to get an update of the latest in Austrian architecture.  Last Thursday the exhibition “In the End: Architecture” opened to the public which marks a milestone in AzW’s history honoring it’s retiring founding director Dietmar Steiner. The Az W takes a look back with him at sixty years of international architectural history.

Starting with the dissolution of CIAM, which proclaimed the “failure” of the modern movement in 1959 and plunged architecture into a profound crisis, the exhibition meanders through history, making stops where Dietmar Steiner underwent his own personal architectural socialisation process: via stations dedicated to critiquing Functionalism, soft urban renewal, New Urbanism and the revision of the modern project, signature architecture, the bottom-up movement and big business. We journey through time to the year 2019, where the cult film Blade Runner has a magnificently bleak backdrop of Los Angeles in the future.

The historical examples of architecture — which reflect world events in architecture in Austria via Dietmar Steiner’s biography — are contrasted by the curators with contemporary positions that engage with ecological, social, structural, legislative, contextual, historical and theoretical aspects of architecture and show, with the breadth of diversity, that architecture is a long way from the end. The dialogue between the two levels of the exhibition is intended to show that a critical new beginning is inherent to every “End”.

IN THE END: ARCHITECTURE

Guided tours of the exhibition:
Sat 15.10., 12.11., 03.12.2016, 17:30
Sat 14.01., 11.02., 18.03.2017, 17:30
Wed 26.10., for the Az W OPEN DAY*, 17:30

Tours given by Dietmar Steiner: 
Wed 12.10., 14.12.2016, 17:30

Location: Architekturzentrum Wien – Old hall
Exhibition: 06 October 2016 – 20 March 2017
Opening Hours: daily 10am-7pm

With contemporary projects contributed by:

Amateur Architecture Studio (Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu), Xinjiang (CN) Thomas Amann and Joachim Hackl, Vienna (AT)
Aristide Antonas, Athens (GR)
architecten de vylder vinck taillieu, Gent (BE)

Assemble, London (GB)
be baumschlager eberle, Lustenau (AT)
Brandlhuber + Emde, Burlon, Berlin (DE)
Caruso St John Architects, London (UK)
Dogma, Brüssel (BE)
Studio Anna Heringer, Laufen (DE) und Martin Rauch, Schlins (AT)
Manuel Herz Architekten, Basel (CH) und Cologne (DE)
Herzog & de Meuron, Basel (CH)
David Kohn Architects, London (UK)
Kuehn Malvezzi, Berlin (DE)
LAN Local Architecture Network, Paris (FR)
MONADNOCK, Rotterdam (NL)
Pilosio Building Peace (Cameron Sinclair und Pouya Khazaeli), Tavagnacco (IT)
Recetas Urbanas, Sevilla (ES)
Rotor, Brussels (BE)
Andreas Rumpfhuber, Expanded Design, Vienna (AT)
Jack Self, London (UK)
TVK Architectes Urbanistes (Alain Trévelo & Antoine Viger-Kohler), Paris (FR)
ZUS Zones Urbaines Sensibles, Rotterdam (NL)
Contributions of Sung Hong Kim, Eungee Cinn, Keehyun Ahn, Seungbum Kim, Isak Chung, Da Eun Jeong and Richard Enos

 

Images: Pez Hejduk, Ossip van Duivenbode, Eduard Hueber, Simona Rota, Margherite Spiluttini