H E F T — LOADED EMPTINESS: ON THE ATMOSPHERIC POTENTIAL OF EMPTY SPACES // Valerie Messini

The Heft is one of the most important buildings in Domenig’s oeuvre – without a doubt my favourite, since the Heft is so much more than just a building. ​“The place is magical, like Stonehenge,” one reads on nextroom.[1] It is an experience, a condition, an atmospheric entity. 

But first, Heft is a place in the municipality of Hüttenberg in Carinthia. For centuries, a blast furnace has stood here – the ​“cathedrals of Heft”, as Domenig called them.[2] Since ancient times, ore was mined and processed into the famous ​“ferrum Noricum” in this area. In 1857 the plant expanded into one of the first Bessemer steelworks in Austria, but shut down in 1908. The Hüttenberg ore mine followed in 1978. An extension to the former blast furnace was built between 1993 and 1995 for the 1995 Carinthian Provincial Exhibition Grubenhunt und Ofensau according to a design[3] by Günther Domenig and demonstrates his adroit handling of historical building fabric.[4] Following the Provincial Exhibition there were a number of attempts to keep the Heft going, such as the Biennale Austria 2002. However, all of the concepts for its reuse were sadly short-lived or failed miserably from the start, mostly because of the unaffordable cost. Finally, over ten years ago, the power was turned off. 

Despite its relevance in the creation of local identity and also international architectural discourse, the Heft does not receive the recognition it deserves – either among architects or in the regional fabric. The political history of the site is also not unproblematic, stoked by Domenig himself, who in the course of the conversion in the 1990s set himself in opposition to local politics at the time. In May 2022, the Heft made headlines again after its year(s)-long hibernation: ​“Heft in Hüttenberg is ​‘kissed awake’ in honour of Günther Domenig.”[5] The former Provincial Exhibition building was opened to the public again for the first time in decades and has played host to art and architecture as well as a wide variety of events: the Heft nimbly adapts to changing user groups and needs, and stages any programme[6] in an equally extraordinary way. Hence my position that the Heft does not need a new and, above all, a fixed use in order to ​“live” again. It is enough that it is simply open. 

Clearing Space – Void – Free Space

The verb ​“to clear” means to empty, to make room or space. For example, one can have a street cleared, of snow or of people. Hence also cleared up, or cleared away. The space is then ​“negatively defined by absence”[7]. My main concern when curating the Heft was first of all to clear the space. The Heft itself becomes the protagonist of the exhibition. In a second step, the artists interact with it, so that it can then be visited and experienced. I specifically wanted to avoid cluttering up and distracting from the Heft, or disturbing the pure perception of the space with too many exhibition objects. Instead, the art here should have an intensifying and accentuating effect. The meaning of emptiness is the central theme. Beyond the programmatic nothingness of the building, which had stood abandoned for over ten years, this also means its formal emptiness: the negative volumes of the empty blast furnaces and Domenig’s bridge-like addition, which is a reference to the underground tunnel system, suggest this debate. 

A prototype of an absolutely empty space is the Pantheon in Rome – the space of all gods. Absolutely empty, the Pantheon nevertheless – or perhaps for this very reason – conveys a strong sense of space. ​“If someone goes in here and doesn’t feel anything, there’s no helping them,” insists Volker Giencke.[8] A dome with a diameter of 43.3 metres creates a very atmospheric space of around 53,000 cubic metres. This emptiness culminates in an opening of just over 100 cubic metres in size – a hole at the highest point. ​“A hole can itself have as much shape-meaning as a solid mass,” Henry Moore argues.[9] Filled volume and void are equal in space. Georges Vantongerloo showed this in 1917 with the following equation: ​“Volume + Void = Space”[10]. Vantongerloo and Moore freed their forms from representative and figurative content early on, so releasing the inherent meaning of the shapes through abstraction. But deconstructivism also subsumes a range of projects from the second half of the 20^th century where the design process was mainly driven by the idea of deconstructing volumes and constructing empty and flowing spaces. As Wigley emphasises: ​“The projects […] mark a different sensibility, one in which the dream of pure form has been disturbed. It is the ability to disturb our thinking about form that makes these projects deconstructive.”[11] For me, deconstructivist architecture is characterised by the inherent dynamic and the drive to liberate itself from predefined typologies. As a result, many of the projects achieve a transformative nature – both on an urban planning and on a personal experience level. Development and spatial perception are central. The spaces generated are sculptural and fluid, the boundary between outside and inside is blurred, the views are multidirectional. In the same way, the Heft is determined by inversions of interior and exterior spaces. Domenig places the ​“Beam” – the built negative volume of the tunnel – at an angle to the existing structure (the Coal Bar), so allowing glimpses of the ruins and producing dynamics. Liesbeth Waechter-Böhm says: ​“It [the Beam] travels like a high-speed train across the whole site, at the same time it also functions as a kind of clamp holding the individual parts of the site together, and it gives a direction.”[12] So Domenig’s sculptural intersections of old and new aim to free up space.

Free(d) space was the main theme at the 16^th Venice Architecture Biennale, curated by architect duo Grafton Architects, founded in 1978, and showcasing a wide variety of architectural acts of liberation. Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara state that ​“FREESPACE focuses on architecture’s ability to provide free and additional spatial gifts to those who use it and on its ability to address the unspoken wishes of strangers. […] FREESPACE can be a space for opportunity, a democratic space, un-programmed and free for uses not yet conceived. There is an exchange between people and buildings that happens, even if not intended or designed, so buildings themselves find ways of sharing and engaging with people over time, long after the architect has left the scene. Architecture has an active as well as a passive life. FREESPACE encompasses freedom to imagine, the free space of time and memory, binding past, present and future together, building on inherited cultural layers, weaving the archaic with the contemporary.”[13] 

The Heft is a Free Space, or it could be if it were opened up. During the summer of 2022 it was open, cleared (up),[14] accentuated by interventions and used for events. It was a stage for art and a place for regional-international exchange: an ​“Art Free Space”. In the spirit of the Heft, the exhibition was never finished, but grew continuously,[15] so reflecting its essence. At the core of my curatorial concept lay the question of the quality of future layers through art, people and nature. Hence the exhibition not only tells the story of the Heft, but also calls for a future. 

ABANDONED

The Heft is a prime example of now unused architecture from the 1980s and 90s, of which there are several in Carinthia. It is high time to consider what opportunities there are for abandoned buildings such as these, whose complete renovation often seems unaffordable. 

In recent years, the Architectural Association (AA) nanotourism Visiting School has been investigating how abandoned sites can be reactivated through minimal interventions. The Heft features two of their installative interventions[16] that highlight the hidden potential of underused cultural buildings. Aljosa Dekleva (et al.) explain: ​“Learning from exhibited examples, we propose that the revival layer for Heft’s Ironworks would consist of creative programming inclusive of local specificities through participation and co- creation processes. The monumental emptiness of the Ironworks is an opportunity for new hybrid social vitals, bringing together the local and global community.”[17]

NATURAL

Decades of abandonment have resulted in a unique environment of encroaching vegetation, which intensifies the spatial quality of the ruinous architecture. ​“The ruin is not just the proximity to something that has already happened, but also the proximity to the failed futures of others. There, where dreams, utopias and ideologies rise and sink again, nature and culture collapse into each other, seep through each other and build up a common ecosystem that reduces the categories of artificial and natural themselves ad absurdum,” write Mihály Németh and Sophie Publig.[18] This slightly dystopian and certainly post-anthropocentric atmosphere inherent in the site has an imposing spatial aesthetic, but also ethic: nature, architecture and ruin create a pluriversal ecology, a place of cross-species coexistence. ​“More recent concepts in biology and philosophy […] renegotiate the boundary between the living world and the ecosystem in a refreshing way. The ​‘Heft’ is not only a good place to reflect on the lack of balance between humans and nature, on the power of natural succession or the becoming of things, but also to analyse landscape architectural strategies for coping with the long-term consequences of human intervention in nature, to explore, more generally, a new ethos in dealing with our ​‘natural’ environment”, Albert Kirchengast reflects.[19] 

The installation ​“Tote Steine” (dead stones) by Albert Kirchengast and the students of the Carinthia University of Applied Sciences hands over the authorship to nature. Splashing and moistening the wall, a small jet of water creates an atmospheric space, together with the earth, which initially darkens the panes and then gradually – dried out by the sun – crumbles. The tiles, laid out in a grid, are deregulated, while the disordered gravel acts like a Zen garden and slows visitors down. In the middle of the room is a footbridge, at the end of which one finds a small grey piece of paper with a note, a poem – a project description:

“The world is, above all, everything the plants could make of it. Emanuele Coccia

A spring flowed to us.

We channelled its water, moved soil,

established gardens, one on metal, the other on stone: 

Ferns grow here, which like coal nourish that fire which separates the elements.

The light always comes from above.”[20]

The metal and the coal are evidence of the mining industry past of the market community of Hüttenberg. Characteristic of the Heft is the contrast between the two building forms found. ​“Old and new do not complement one another here, but they do not contradict each other either. […] And what only very rarely succeeds: the new components enhance the atmospheric effect of the old,” notes Liesbeth Waechter-Böhm.[21] The historic ironworks is a massive brick building whose design is derived directly from the topographical conditions and functional requirements for industrial iron ore mining. Domenig contrasted this with a light steel framework whose form owes less to function than to an architectural idea. Following the trend towards idealism and away from heavy matter, the question of the next, future architectural layer arises: intangible, virtual und digital?

VIRTUAL

In the 1960s, Walter Pichler and Hans Hollein worked together on a new concept of architecture which, freed from the constraints of building, aimed to open up an expansion of space. At the same time, Ivan Sutherland and his students at Harvard University devised the head-mounted display, the first virtual reality system. Günther Domenig and Eilfried Huth were also trying to find definitions for space that were detached from matter: ​“Medium Total […] symbolizes a biomorphic, autonomous structure, crisscrossed by sensory channels and technical infrastructure in the style of works by the artist Walter Pichler in the 1960s.”[22] 

This idea of the transformation of architecture into a mutated biological organism is demonstrated by students Alina Logunova, Peter Marius, Tomaž Roblek and Adam Sinan in their augmented reality installation Cyber Nature: via a smartphone we can see graphic elements from Domenig and Huth’s Medium Total drawings growing up the blast furnace shaft, like plants. The project shows a cybernetic nature forming a new dynamic layer.[23] At the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the seminar Other Matter[24] investigated the possibilities of virtual space population through the playful use of augmented reality. Ephemeral, audiovisual objects, structures or installations were created that act in dialogue with the existing architectural context of the Heft and enable new media-centred spatial experiences. The AR installation Synthetic Reciprocities shows synthetic overgrowth: huge leaves and mushrooms grow out of the walls, getting bigger and bigger, blocking the path. This work raises awareness of the life of buildings and their inhabitants, the character of ruins and the legacies of the Anthropocene. It seeks to strengthen natural agents to repopulate the artificially rationalised space.[25]

ATMOSPHERE AND PRESENCE

In her work Invisible World, part of the programme staged at the Heft, Brigitte Mahlknecht understands space as experiential space, ​“space as philosophical space in the phenomenological sense, as poetic and as political space, spaces that overlap and intersect.”[26] She describes performative spaces that can be experienced physically and hold affective potential. Marie-Luise Angerer speaks of a ​“somatic-affective turn”[27], pointing to a ubiquitous rise in the affective in the arts, humanities and social sciences as well as media theories. The increased interest in the affective is evidence of a longing for a concept of reality that goes beyond linguistic-analytical reflection and opens up access to the world also through aesthetic perception. Angerer demonstrates that the digital and the affective have something in common: both want to establish a direct access to the human brain or organism. Feelings become the medium between body and mind, which shakes the concept of a consciously acting individual and leads to a gradual dissolution of the boundary between human/animal/machine.[28] Nikolaus Kuhnert (et al.) concludes from this that ​“the effect of architecture is coming to the fore again, specifically effect in the sense that architecture is capable of projecting (alternative) life designs. Through the effects that in turn produce affects, architecture should have a direct impact and not take the roundabout route of interpreting meaning.”[29] Ole W. Fischer specifies: “… ​‘atmospheric interaction’ appears as a preconscious, pre-linguistic, cognitive response that starts with affect” and is particularly useful (as a design method) for a ​“conceptual inclusion of the viewer’s perception and imaginative world”.[30] A diverse range of regimes have always created atmospheric architecture in the form of imposing sacred buildings as an instrument of power. Perception, however, is reduced to a predetermined perspective. The protagonists of post-criticality emancipate themselves from this and demand the ​“production of individual, ambiguous and synaesthetic facilities of reception”.[31] The fact that atmosphere enables individual reception is evidence of its identity-forming potential. This is comparable to Judith Butler’s understanding of the body as an ​“active process of embodying certain cultural and historical possibilities”.[32] For Butler, the process of embodiment is a process of performative creation of identity. In modernity, a purely analytical and critical discussion was at the centre of most disciplines. The aesthetic experience was treated as a secondary quality, actually only resulting from the analytical value: the senses were subordinate to reason. As Marie-Luise Angerer indicates: ​“With the concept of presence the body and the senses are reintroduced into theoretical discourse.”[33]

Poetry breathes out of the blast furnace, an old voice, a man, digitally processed, hopeless, sombre, yet at the same time fascinating. The aesthetics of this soundscape seem related to the atmosphere of mining. A number of videos – dispersed on small screens across the Heft – show the human body in the context of the Heft and the nature of Hüttenberg. The repetitive movements filmed from architecturally significant perspectives reveal the pulse of the Heft. ARobota+ asserts: ​“We dance, we browse, we ship from anywhere […]. Our method is playing, to continue the play, we change the way we play.”[34] 

The senses are also at the centre of Florian Hecker’s work. He is interested in the listening process and the listening experience of the audience. Through his synthetic sounds, Hecker creates an abstract, but physically extremely experiential space. His installation Untitled formed the end and climax of the Heft programme, in the cantilever part of the glazed beam, the most extreme space of the site: the view in all directions, the sun is blinding, it is hot, it is vibrating. His material interventions are minimal and extremely precise: three speakers, suspended, in geometric relation to Domenig’s steel construction. The sound fills the space and creates an auditive analogy to the existing overlays of structures and textures. Florian Hecker elaborates: ​“Departing from earlier projects that experimented with the impressionistic or even hallucinatory relationship between sonic objects, the auditory encounter, and our self-perception within space, the sound piece advances a more recent line of inquiry engaged with approaches to computational auditory analysis and the synthesis of sensory materials and meaning.”[35]

“I still believe that architecture and the ritual aspect of architecture can come to one point, where it is complete, absolute, where it has no other function, than being architecture”, Hans Hollein proclaimed as early as the 1990s.[36] Although I often wish for it or look for it, these undisturbed spatial experiences are becoming increasingly rare. Architectural discourse is increasingly determined by the growing, at best geometric, but mostly economic and administrative complexity of building processes. As early as 1984 Baudrillard spoke of the ​“obesity of all current systems”. It is the first time in human history that a threat is not caused by lack, but on the contrary by the ​“excess of positivity”.[37] Particularly at present, moments reserved for a pure spatial experience have a special importance. The Heft is one such moment.

Sources:

[1] Liesbeth Waechter-Böhm, ​“Landesausstellung Kärnten – Hüttenberg. Für Grubenhunt und Ofensau”, 18.2.1995, https://​www​.nextroom​.at/​b​uildi…, (01.12.2022)

[2] Mario Waste, ​“Domenig Geschichte(n)”, interview in: Günther Domenig: DIMENSIONAL, Exhib. Heft/​Hüttenberg 2022 

[3] Günther Domenig worked on several designs over a number of years; in the interim there was even a change of location and Domenig drew up a completely new design for the neighbouring village of Knappenberg. Finally a cost-saving version was built, as evident in the reduced glazing of the beam as well as the non-winter-proof design of the Coal Bar.

[4] The Heft was the object of study and precursor for Domenig’s intervention at the Documentation Center Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg: Domenig was invited to compete on the basis of an international publication on the Heft.

[5] ​“Vierteilige Ausstellung – Heft in Hüttenberg wird zu Ehren Günther Domenigs ​‘wachgeküsst’”, Kleine Zeitung, 9 May 2022, https://​www​.kleinezeitung​.at/k… (01.12.2022)

[6] From the hoop dance rehearsal, to various lectures and workshops, to party and concert 

[7] Peter Weibel, Negativer Raum. Skulptur und Installation im 20./21. Jahrhundert, ZKM Karlsruhe 2019, p. 3

[8] Volker Giencke, Steinhaus Forum 24.9.2022

[9] Weibel, op. cit., p.19

[10] Weibel, op. cit., p.13

[11]Mark Wigley, ​“Deconstructivist Architecture”, in (exhib. cat): Philip Johnson, Deconstructivist architecture – Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, The Museum of Modern Art 1988, p.10, www​.moma​.org/​c​a​l​e​n​d​a​r​/​e​x​h​ibiti… (01.12.2022)

[12] Waechter-Böhm, op. cit.

[13] Manifesto ​“FREESPACE”, https://​www​.labiennale​.org/en/…, (30.01.2023)

[14] The LIM (Landesimmobiliengesellschaft Kärnten) invested over 140,000 EUR to restore the sanitary facilities, the electricity and the accessibility of the Heft – a basic requirement for the opening. 

[15] Various events, lectures and workshops were continuously added to the exhibition and the online archive.

[16] Cultural Centre of European Space Technologies in Vitanje and the Vienna Boys’ Choir Campus on Lake Wörthersee

[17]AA nanotourism Visiting School, Aljosa Dekleva, Amanda Sperger and Jakob Travnik, ​“Revival of Underused Cultural Infrastructures”, project description for Günther Domenig: DIMENSIONAL, Exhib. Heft/​Hüttenberg 2022

[18] Mihály Németh, Sophie Publig, ​“Palimpsest”, 2022, https://​wid​.uni​-ak​.ac​.at/​dimen…, (01.12.2022)

[19]Albert Kirchengast, ​“Ethos des Lebendigen”, project description in: Günther Domenig: DIMENSIONAL, exhib. Heft/​Hüttenberg 2022

[20] Stefanie Armstorfer, Egon Grünwald, Nikolaus Hellmann, Christopher Juwan, Alina Kristler, Alexander Pagitsch, Dalibor Stojakovic with Albert Kirchengast, ​“Tote Steine”, Seminar Architekturgeschichte und Ethik FH Kärnten und Workshop in: Günther Domenig: DIMENSIONAL, exhib. Heft/​Hüttenberg 2022

[21] Waechter-Böhm, op. cit.

[22] Günther Domenig & Eilfried Huth, Medium Total, 1969 – 1970, https://​www​.guentherdomenig​.at… (30.1.2022)

[23] Alina Logunova, Peter Marius, Tomaz Roblek, Adam Sinan, ​“Other Matter – Cyber Nature”, in: Günther Domenig: DIMENSIONAL, exhib. Heft/​Hüttenberg 2022

[24] Valerie Messini, Bence Pap, ​“Other Matter”, https://​base​.uni​-ak​.ac​.at/cour… (01.12.2022)

[25] Tilman Fabini, Naomi Neururer, Arkady Zavialov, ​“Other Matter – Synthetic Reciprocities”, in: Günther Domenig: DIMENSIONAL, exhib. Heft/​Hüttenberg 2022

[26] Brigitte Mahlknecht, Invisible Worlds – DIMENSIONAL, In-situ brush drawing, acrylic on canvas, in: Günther Domenig: DIMENSIONAL, exhib. Heft/​Hüttenberg 2022

[27] Marie-Luise Angerer, Desire after Affect. London/​New York (Rowan & Littlefield) 2015, p. 10

[28] Angerer, op. cit., p. 22

[29] Nikolaus Kuhnert, Anh-Linh Ngo with Stephan Becker and Martin Luce, ​“Die Produktion von Präsenz. Potenziale des Atmosphärischen” in: archplus 178, June 2006, p. 23

[30] Ole W. Fischer, ​“Critical, Post-Critical, Projective” in: archplus 174, December 2005, p. 95

[31] ibid.

[32] Judith Butler, ​“Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” in: Theatre Journal, 40(4), 519 – 531, 1988, p. 521

[33] Marie-Luise Angerer, ​“Affekt und Begehren oder: Was macht den Affekt so begehrenswert?”, in: e‑Journal Philosophie der Psychologie, http://​www​.phps​.at/​t​e​x​t​e​/​Anger…, January 2006, p. 3

[34] ARobota+, Binich+, in: Günther Domenig: DIMENSIONAL, exhib. Heft/​Hüttenberg

[35] Florian Hecker, Untitled, Sound-Installation, in: Günther Domenig: DIMENSIONAL, exhib. Heft/​Hüttenberg

[36] Hans Hollein, Lectures an der AA School of Architecture, London 1981, https://​www​.youtube​.com/​w​a​t​c​h​?​v​=​i​7​W​n​e​F​6fQoo (01.12.2022).

[37] Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, Stanford (Stanford University Press) 2015, p.7