Raimund Abraham [UN]BUILT

15 years after its publication, the second edition of the Austrian visionary architect's monograph includes new archival material.

Raimund Abraham. [UN]BUILT
2nd revised and enlarged edition, edited by Brigitte Groihofer, Springer, 2011 (348 pp., £62.99)

There are books that seem to don't have a certain time. You can read them again and again, smell them, browse through their pages and always find a new detail that makes them essential. This is one of these books. The first edition of the monograph [UN]BUILT was published in 1996. It was preceded by an extensive research and the compilation of a list of works. Part of the great value of this second edition, in hands of Brigitte Groihofer, is that Raimund Abraham's daughter, Una, gave her access to the archives which contains the sketches, drawings and photographs of Abraham's work, making possible to reconstruct all the illustrations that appeared on the first edition, but updating and reproducing new material by digital means.

Abraham said in a conversation with Kenneth Frampton [1] that his chosen thematic owes its origin to his intimate memories, and more generally to the potential for questioning the historical significance of architectural form and thereby for negating its established conventions. This rebel attitude is the essence of the work of Abraham and his response to the architectural and metaphysical concerns he had on his life. His work is based on the right balance between dream and reality, utopia and irony, and is in this balance the central point that transforms his architecture into something evocative, beyond any other speculations. He designed structures to be placed in the Moon [Moon Crater City] and, at the same time, he wanted to drill the planet with his Radar Cities. We can better understand him by reading the poem he wrote in 1973 [2]:
"... I try
to manifest the presence
of the horizons
my eyes become earth
projected fragments
of a weightless body
without dimension
without possible modulation
in space or time."

Abraham's idea of "dwelling in the suburbs of dreams" was the guideline of some of his most interesting housing projects in the 1970s, including the "10 Houses", "9 Houses Triptych", "Seven Gates to Eden" and "House with Projected Landscapes". The book also includes the project "House for Euclid" that represents what Abraham said was his first architectural dream, which ended up being a series of drawings where "surreal and real became interchangeable metaphors." With all this projects published, now it's easier to understand Abraham's entire life works. The book is organized in four main corps: Imaginary Architecture [1961-2009], Texts by Raimund Abraham, Texts on Raimund Abraham and the Appendix. Raimund Abraham's œuvre talks about utopias, fictions, poetry and the avant-garde. His architectural visions can be defined as "architectural poetry on paper" [3]. His "imaginary architecture" is plenty of emotions.

We can see on his very first drawings of the 1960s, similarities with the work of Hans Hollein and Walter Pichler, and due to this coincidences the three of them were featured on the exhibition and book Envisioning Architecture: Drawings from The Museum of Modern Art. But the links of Raimund Abraham with the avant-garde groups goes beyond Hollein and Pichler. His works on megastructures drives us directly to think on Archigram and the Metabolist group, and some of his drawings, especially the "Seven Gates to Heaven" and the "House for Euclid", also remind us Gaetano Pesce's Church of Solitude. The implementation of technological ideas on his speculative projects evolved in the form of ideal cities, some of them just like visual poems of paper architecture. Miller wrote: "Abrahams turns the vision of future cities into a harrying, nightmarish experience, where architecture no longer consolidates the functions of an urbanistic coexistence into a building, but where instead the orderly utopia has been replaced by a chaotic, live monster that seems to generate all its organizational forms out of itself without even been aware of them."

Raimund Abraham was also a prolific writer, his interest in theory as the supposition for architectural thought and for architecture itself, led him to write numerous essays, where he talked about his ideas, speculations and inspirations. According to him, the confrontation between theory and practice was the dialectical foundation of all architecture thinking. His interest in philosophical or metaphysical readings is embodied on his entire œuvre. In the book Brodsky & Utkin, The Complete Works [4], Lois Nesbitt writes about the important role of this kind of drawings and speculative projects as a graphic form of architectural criticism. Following Nesbitt's point, we can find the same critical voice on Abraham's unbuilt projects and the complete sense of the book comes when we understand that for him, building means to build with words, lines, shadows, volume and rock; and he remarked this idea when saying "For me the piece of paper is the space and the pencil the tool with which to intervene and shape." The book includes all the original essays of Kenneth Frampton, John Hejduk, and Lebbeus Woods, published on the first edition. Now, it also includes new essays by Kenneth Frampton, P. Adams Sitney, Guy Nordensen, Carlos Brillembourg, Wolf D. Prix, Wieland Schmied, and editor Brigitte Groihofer; among several essays and poems by Raimund Abraham.

Mega Bridge IV, perspective section, 1965.

"To draw is to cut an idea into a body, violating its silence.
To draw is to map the world through signs, locating the absence of the eyes."
R. A. [Fragmentary Notes]

Stargazer, from: Loci Ultimi, The Last Abodes of Mankind, 2003

Notes:
[1]"Nine Questions to Raimund Abraham" An interview by Kenneth Frampton first published in the exhibition catalogue "Collisions", Yale University, 1985.
[2] Fragment of a poem written by Raimund Abraham for the project "The Cosmology of the House: Universe of Man" in 1973 [New York - Vienna].
[3] Norbert Miller. Imagination and the calculus of reality. Raimund Abraham [UN]BUILT, Springer, 2011.
[4] Brodsky & Utkin, The Complete Works. Edited by Lois Nesbitt. Princenton Architectural Press, 2003.

Raimund Abraham [UN]BUILT

15 years after its publication, the second edition of the Austrian visionary architect's monograph includes new archival material.

Latest News

Latest on Domus