Hintergrund 22

Description

For this issue, we pick out five exemplary positions from the three-day lecture program. In our search for new standards and criteria that spring from a tradition of modernity, a tradition that is essentially based on an unshakable belief in progress and growth, we first came across the work of sociologist Gerhard Schulze. His lecture `Wohin bewegt sich die Moderne´, an excerpt from his book “Die beste aller Welten” (The Best of All Worlds) forms a theoretical starting point for the further discussion of utopian concepts in cultural production, which Dietmar Steiner presents in retrospect of Austrian architecture of the 1960s.
The architect Vicente Guallart finds this in a demolished half of a mountain in the south of Spain, which he will rebuild, although opinions differ somewhat about the utopian content of the filling of this building – hotel, entertainment area, shopping mall and adventure pool.
Jan Kaplicky’s meditations on the inspirational sources of his work can be traced on the picture pages. We limit ourselves here to a selection of 12 “slides” from his lecture entitled “360 slides”.
If you now think that the genre of “science fiction” has no answer to the question of the survival of mankind, you are mistaken. Film theorist Drehli Robnik points out in his lecture `Flexible in Ruins. What can become of cities when blockbuster cinema looks through them and rebuilds them´ clearly demonstrates where the future of living (f)lies.