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marzo 15, 2018 - MAK Museum

GUSTAV PEICHL: 15 Buildings for His 90th Press Conference


Press release available only in original language. 

On the occasion of his 90th birthday, the MAK is honoring the Austrian architect Gustav Peichl (born 18 March 1928 in Vienna) with the solo exhibition GUSTAV PEICHL: 15 Buildings for His 90th. In a career spanning over 50 years, Peichl—who under the pseudonym IRONIMUS was also a highly successful political caricaturist—has created 70 buildings. For the exhibition in the MAK he has selected 15 buildings that provide an exemplary insight into his extensive life’s work. The buildings have been photographed in their current condition exclusively for the MAK by the German artist Pola Sieverding and contextualized using sketches, drafts, and plans from the MAK Collection. In 2013, Peichl donated a comprehensive collection of over 8 000 sketches, #design concepts, draft drawings, and plans for his buildings realized in Austria to the MAK. These include public building contracts, urban planning projects, plans for social housing, and prestigious one-family houses as well as unrealized projects. The MAK Library and Works on Paper Collection has in its care numerous portfolios and the (partial) estates of famous architects, to include Edmund Moiret, Josef Hoffmann, Otto Niedermoser, Otto Prutscher, and Anna-Lülja Praun. Contemporary items entered the collection with the estate of Hans Hollein and Gustav Peichl’s donation. In this digital age, in which most planning is done at the computer, Peichl sees sketching as thinking on paper. For him, buildings and architecture are the sum total of form, function, material, color, and light. One should strive for sensuality in architecture, for an architecture inspired by Eros. As a representative of classical modernity, Peichl is committed to a technical aesthetic, classical proportions, humor, and sensuality—his approach is thus both distinctive and autonomous. The exhibition GUSTAV PEICHL: 15 Buildings for His 90th is organized chronologically, starting with Peichl’s first building, the NEWAG-NIOGAS Administration Building (1958– 1960), designed in collaboration with Wilhelm Hubatsch and Franz Kiener. It takes in the legendary ORF Studios (1969–1972 and 1979–1983) and concludes with the striking kin-dergarten designed for the German Parliament and located on the banks of the Spree in Berlin (1997–1999). The sketches, drafts, and submitted plans are for the most part being shown to the public for the first time. Artist Pola Sieverding’s photographs create unusual perspectives, emphasizing the strong materiality and incisive language of form of Peichl’s architecture. The original drafts and construction plans, some of them sixty years old, are juxtaposed with photographs of the final results, buildings that to this day shape the locations, towns, and landscapes in which they stand. Peichl’s fine instinct for architectural trends is apparent inter alia in his #design for the Atrium School Krim in Döbling, #vienna (1961–1962). White walls, flat roofs, and open glass surfaces impart a distinctive character to a building designed to foster community and communication. This sense of community is heightened in the Dominican Nunnery School in Hietzing, #vienna (1963–1965), for which Peichl created small residential communities. A key work in his oeuvre is the Satellite Earth Station in Graßnitz in Styria (1976–1979), which is impressively integrated into the landscape. Peichl succeeded in creating a perfect symbiosis of architecture and technology by constructing the high-tech plant underground and covering it with a grassy hill. But Peichl owes his reputation as an architect above all to the ORF Studios, all of which follow the same formal principle: segments of a circle arranged around a central area. In Germany too Peichl has enjoyed great success: in the framework of the International Building Exhibition (IBA) in Berlin, he won the competition to #design the Phosphate Elimination Plant in Tegel, Berlin (1980–1985). He also designed the Bundeskunsthalle [Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany] in Bonn (1986–1992), the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main (1987–1990), and the Werkraumtheater of the Münchner Kammerspiele in Munich (1990–1993). These buildings are included in the exhibition in the form of a loan from the Berlin Academy of Arts, that since 2013 has been the custodian of some 3 100 sketches, drawings, plans, and models of Peichl’s building projects in Germany. Piechl twice participated in the Venice Bienniale of Architecture, as well as the Kassel documenta. He has been awarded numerous international prizes, to include the Reynolds Memorial Award. From 1973 to 1996, he was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts #vienna, and from 2002 to 2003 a guest professor at the Harvard School of #design in Boston.


GUSTAV PEICHL: 15 Buildings for His 90th Press Conference 

Friday, 16 March 2018, 10:30 a.m. Opening Tuesday, 20 March 2018, 7 p.m. Exhibition Venue MAK Works on Paper Room and MAK Columned Main Hall MAK, Stubenring 5, 1010 #vienna Exhibition Dates 21 March – 19 August 2018 Opening Times Tue 10 a.m.–10 p.m., Wed–Sun 10 a.m.–6 p.m.