Exhibition

In the End: Architecture

Journeys through Time 1959 – 2019

Thu 06.10.2016 – Mon 20.03.2017

Exhibition poster: In the End: Architecture
© Architekturzentrum Wien, photograph: Simona Rota, graphic design: LIGA: graphic design

Opening speakers

Dietmar Steiner, Director Az W
Karoline Mayer, Sonja Pisarik, Katharina Ritter, Curators
Andreas Mailath-Pokorny, Executive Councillor for Culture and Science, Vienna

To mark the retirement of founding director Dietmar Steiner the Az W takes a look, 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”.

Curators: Karoline Mayer, Sonja Pisarik, Katharina Ritter
Exhibition design: BWM Architekten und Partner
External scientific consultancy: Gabriele Kaiser, Anh-Linh Ngo
Image Research & Public Relations: Irene Jäger
Exhibition graphic design: Nicole Six