9th Vienna Architecture Congress

The annual Vienna Architecture Congress is a contemporary forum for the presentation and discussion of topical tendencies in international architecture and urban planning. With the declared aim of directly or indirectly influencing cultural and social changes, architecture and urban planning and in an extended sense to encompass theoretically and discuss the issues, the three-day platform has been able to establish itself successfully as a meeting point for international architects, theorists, artists and authors.

In November 2001 the Vienna Architecture Congress is to be held for the 9th year in succession. Following themes such as ’Publishing Architecture’, ’The Future of Cities – Learning from Asia’ and ’Where Will We Live?’ the 9th Vienna Architecture Congress is to concentrate on issues already presented in the exhibition ’Sturm der Ruhe. What is Architecture?’ on both a theoretical and a discursive level.

BACKGROUND
‘The room in the house shuts one casing inside the other … The number of layers, of strata, of walls from plaster to bedsheet, the number of skins up to real skin amazes empiricists. We have already counted veils and protective clothing. No, we do not live as people on earth, as is written in books, we cannot claim this to be true, we cannot bear it, rather, we live like a variety of mammals or coddled primates, which, after having lost their fur, invented the house and immediately filled it with layers of casings inside of each other. It was the house in the countryside which faced the world, the completely encapsuled flat of today merely faces the city. Language forms the last of the protective walls around our tender skin, following pictures and paintings. When one listens to radio or television, one believes that the world itself is entering in person.’
(Michel Serres)

Architecture is both an instrument of mediation and of translation, a point of intersection between the collective and the individual characterised by the relevant social and local environment. Architecture satisfies people’s most elementary and most basic needs. Above all, however, architecture makes its presence felt; it is intrinsically and explicitly experiential. It is material, smell, sound, feeling, breadth, narrowness. It is about space, non-space, comfort and discomfort.

‘Architecture is subject to the realization of the capital, to be sure; but its social function may not be restricted to the economic dimension. The social and cultural dimension is not determined by the economic dimension in a one-sided manner. Architecture is conditioned and it is conditioning, architecture as a collective fact is inseparable from society, but `its principles are of specific nature; they are derived from architecture itself ´. (Aldo Rossi) In other words, architecture is a discipline possessing its own principles and maintaining them under the mentioned conditions.’
(Martin Steinmann)

A shared trait among the architects represented in the exhibition ’Sturm der Ruhe. What is Architecture?’ is that they all attempt to approach users on a sensual level of subjective physical perception, on the level of direct experience, of immediacy. What is the potential for productive critical analysis of these architectural and planning strategies? Are we dealing here with a new form of escapism, or are there new possibilities to be found in the minimal, in the ’invisible’ and in the attempt to evade the appropriation of architecture and design by the consumer and culture industry?

‘We are not attacking the diversity of the stylistic means, but the randomness with which they are applied. We are turning against this random application because it always serves the dismantling of resistance, an aesthetic, political resistance to simple consumability, to the extreme rapidity with which this consumerism has to be fed with new images.’
(Herzog + de Meuron)

Organisation and Information:
Isabella Marte
Phone: ++43 1 522 31 15 Ext. 13
E-Mail: congress@azw.at

Programme / Speakers / Biographies

Friday, November 09, 2001
Saturday, November 10, 2001
Sunday, November 11, 2001

Friday, November 09, 2001

3:00 p.m.
Opening
Dietmar Steiner, Director of the Architekturzentrum Wien

3:30 p.m.
Introduction
Johannes Porsch, Editor “Sturm der Ruhe. What is Architecture?”

4:30 p.m.
“What is Architecture?”
Georg Franck, Cultural theorist (A)

6:00 p.m.
“The Aesthetic Cocoon”
Neil Leach, Architect, theorist (GB)

Saturday, November 10, 2001

3:00 p.m.
“Architekturgeschichte-Geschichte und Wahrnehmung: von Distanz und Nähe”
Bettina Köhler, Art historian (CH)

5:00 p.m.
“Architektur, die sich selbst genügt”
Meinrad Morger, (Morger / Degelo Architects, CH)

6:30 p.m.
“Talking Back: Architecture and Interactivity”
Lars Lerup, Architect (USA)

Sunday, November 11, 2000

2:00 p.m.
“On Immediacy. Über die Unmittelbarkeit”
Wilfried Wang, Architectural theorist (D)

3:30 p.m.
“On risks and side-effects”
Ulrike Jehle-Schulte Strathaus, Director of the Architekturmuseum Basel (CH)

5:00 p.m.
Final Discussion