Every decision needs reflection," and, "if documented, it could be called a form of storytelling. And narrative needs creativity, and imagination needs curiosity and passion.
Hermann Czech
Hermann Czech. Starting from the existent presents for the first time in Italy the professional and intellectual trajectory of the acclaimed Austrian architect, a significant critical voice on the contemporary architectural scene. The selected projects for the exhibition cover a relevant time span, from the 1960s to the present, and include urban visions, residential buildings, installations and small transformative interventions on the existing.
Drawings, photographs, models and a significant series of original furniture elements are presented along a sequence of rooms that identify design themes related to different scales of the city’s transformation. A series of original documents testifies Czech’s relevant intellectual activity, significantly presenting the link between his critical thinking and Viennese architectural culture.
The exhibition is complemented by a photo essay by Stefano Graziani investigating the working space of Czech’s studio in Vienna.
The exhibition "Hermann Czech. Starting from the existent" collects projects elaborated throughout his career, with the ambition to present a unique professional and intellectual trajectory to the Italian public, with possible assonances with some similar experiences in Milan. In this moment of stagnation, where only aspects related to the easy consumption of an image seem relevant, his critical intelligence and stubborn attraction to the existing, in radical projects and the smallest transformations, are more illuminating than ever.
There are few architects whose work is so inextricably linked- and thus extraordinarily understandable- to the city in which they worked. Hermann Czech's built works, as well as his theoretical work, resonate in complex ways with Viennese urban culture: with the physical city, the Baroque city and the modern city, and with the revolutionary ideas of the architects who so distinctively defined its character, such as Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos and Josef Frank.
For Czech, there is no architecture without a relationship to real place, to unexpectedly profitable contingencies or inevitably adverse circumstances, to the existing. At the same time, for Czech there is no architecture without the construction of thought, without the production of knowledge that reworks in radically new terms reflections that have already emerged in that context, in a relational and critical conception of continuity of thought and action.
For him, exactly like his distinguished precursors, constructing and elaborating thought are faces of the same act of transforming reality, a "culturally sustainable" transformation. Czech's action is thus directed toward understanding the complexity of the city and its modification within society at a given moment in history. From here, architecture can continuously construct its meaning and environmental quality.
BIOGRAPHY
Born in Vienna in 1936, Hermann Czech studied architecture at the Technische Hochschule and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna under Ernst A. Plischke. In 1958 and 1959 he attended Konrad Wachsmann's seminars at the Salzburg Summer Academy. He started working on architectural projects in 1960 and wrote architectural criticism for Die Furche from 1963 to 1967. From the 1970s onwards, he realised projects on various scales. In 1978 his first writings were published under the title Zur Abwechslung (new, expanded edition in 1996); in 2021 Ungefähre Hauptrichtung - Schriften und Gespräche zur Architektur was published (both published by Löcker Verlag). Hermann Czech has taught as a guest professor at several national and international universities, including Harvard University in Cambridge (Massachusetts), ETH Zurich, TU Wien and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He has received prizes and awards for his architectural work. He participated in the Venice Architecture Biennale in 1980, 1991, 2000, 2012 and most recently in 2023 together with the AKT collective.
Hermann Czech lives and works in Vienna.
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