The great master Pierluigi Nervi wrote: “the possibility of creating any form out of melted stones, superior to those that can be found in nature because of their resistance to tension, has something magical about it”. This definition regards Raimund Abraham's work. Born in 1933 in Lienz (Austria), Raimund Abraham completed his studies at the Graz polytechnic, he worked in Vienna with Walter Pichler from 1960 to 1964, and subsequently moved to New York, where he teaches at the Cooper Union School and at the Pratt Institute. During the sixties and seventies he had a leading role in the Austrian Radical movement and his move to the United States led to major contributions, resulting from the contact between European and American experimental avant-gardes. What is architecture for Raimund Abraham? He views architecture with a poet’s eyes. He deems it is the poet’s approach that sets free the rigid and preformed shapes of architecture and allows buildings to regain their wide-ranging and positive aspects. Indeed, this was the view expressed by Raimund Abraham in his text “Elementar architektur”, which summarised the philosophy of the Austrian Radical Movement that developed over the period 1958 – 1980, and also transpires in the work of architects such as Fritz Wotruba and Lauridis Ortner. “A conceptual poetics of deconstruction of mega-structural architectonic objects, the recovery of metaphysical and archetypal emotionality, the freeing from trilith building systems and hence the search for tension rather than balance, the taste for parataxis”; these are the words with which Roberto Masiero describes the inspiring principles of the Austrian Radical movement, one of the founders of which was Raimund Abraham. “I draw inspiration for my works from anonymous buildings, from daily machinery, from landscapes I happen to see during my walks, or from the poetic view of a literary text.” This is why his works denote a deep outlook which externalises a mental building project to be executed with solid and dense materials, such as metal or cement, in the phenomenal mutation of transparent metals to give substance to light, spaces and to the interplay of empty and full spaces. Raimund Abraham’s woks actually construct an architecture which cuts and projects shadows: volumes form solid shadow masses, bodies of compressed space: a different thickening of matter. They are founded on an intimate need, that of projecting the primary source towards the outside world. Architecture is in itself artifice, but it constantly relates itself to the nature of the surrounding environment, by confronting it in a perpetual dilemma between what is inside and what is outside, between that which departs from earth and always rises to the sky and that which is space and becomes form. Raimund Abraham’s architectural works link this relationship to the mathematical laws governing numbers, because numbers represent the essence which brings together matter and form and gives substance to both, through the concreteness of their constructions. Each building is a figure which materialises this meeting between heaven and earth, between man’s horizon and the horizon as it is transformed by the building and which changes the building itself from the very beginning. On the occasion of the lecture, organised by the Millennium Meetings to take place in Venice at Palazzo Badoer, the Austrian architect re-examines the accomplishments of the last decade through five works: the Hypo House, Lienz, 1993-96; the new Austrian Cultural Institute, New York, 1993-2001; the House for Music, Holzheim, 1994; the Ascona Lakeside, 2000 and the Architect’s House, Mexico, 2000-2001. Among these, the new Austrian Cultural Institute, 11 East 52nd Street in Manhattan, combines, with its own body, gravity and suspension in the space, as it rises to the sky where it somehow disembodies. The tectonic background shows through the compression of the lateral space, which is marked by the weight and height of the adjacent buildings. This project, which was the winner among 226 entries for the open competition announced by the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1992, provided for the construction of an 80 m high building on a rather small lot: along the road the building lot extended for 7.60 metres and had a 28.30 metre depth. The plasticity of the building fully expresses Abraham’s figurative language, characterised by marked graphic signs. The tower is defined by three syntactic elements: the Vertebra – Stair Tower; the Core – Structural Tower; the Mask – Glass Tower, signifying the opposite forces of gravity: ascension, support and suspension. Interviewed about this building, the architect stated: ”What is the New York background? On one side of the Institute stands a horrible post-war skyscraper, and on the other side is a hotel, which is just as horrible and was built before the war. People like to call New York a collage, but a collage would involve some sort of planning. On the other hand, New York resembles much more an anarchic imponderability”. The Vertebra of the Stair Tower stretches towards infinity, like Brancusi’s endless column, possibly to break away from its surroundings and, in the sky, abandon confusion and regain the harmony of figurative oneness. No doubt, the challenges of the new millennium are tough, since with the radical change that is taking place in science, technology and society, the arts, which have always accompanied world life and existence, have to keep pace with progress without losing the romance of those who, besides acting, are also able to contemplate the space between heaven and earth, between matter and form, between chaos and order, in a constant radical renewal. Today, research and technology allow the materials offer standards that would have appeared incredible and unconceivable only twenty years ago and make the relationship between the world of design and that of realisation even more vital and essential. Research, Applied Research and Building Technologies share basic objectives: esthetical and functional quality, curability and performance.

(Trad. Interpres sas Giussano)