BUILDING: EXPRESSION OF THE PERSONAL: NOTES ON THE EARLY GÜNTHER DOMENIG // Matthias Boeckl
At the age of forty, Günther Domenig defined construction as a highly personal, potentially autobiographical medium of expression with his pioneering Z‑Bankfiliale in the Favoriten district of Vienna (1974−79). Following on from his early partnership with Eilfried Huth in Graz (1963−73), this was the first building he planned with his own office. He also had an active personal involvement in the construction.[1] Seven years after its completion, he reflected: “Vienna has a celebrated history and tradition in the arts, poetry and music. I have always associated it with a death wish and a feeling of decay; it is a place in which to destroy oneself. While working there, I realized that it was possible to use the opportunity to develop a personal approach and to insist on quality as an underlying principle of my work. I had reached a point in my life when I realized that for the first time, I could express myself as an architect and builder.”[2]
At the transition between “1968” and postmodernism, the Viennese art scene at the time seems to have provided the crucial impetus for this: Domenig now wanted to use the many innovative constructions and materials he had previously tested to spectacular effect in expressive-sculptural realisations such as the Pädagogische Hochschule der Diözese Graz (with Eilfried Huth, exposed concrete, 1963 – 69), the exhibition design of trigon 67 (with Eilfried Huth, plastic shell over tubular steel frame), the Vöest-Forschungs- und Rechnungszentrum in Leoben (with Eilfried Huth, steel suspended construction, 1970 – 73) and the Mensa der Schulschwestern in Graz (with Eilfried Huth, sprayed concrete construction, 1972 – 77) now serve the expression of his own personality.
The Z as a turning point
Despite his earlier work on the headquarters of the city’s Zentralsparkasse,[3] Domenig had maintained only selective contact with the Viennese art and architecture establishment. He had, however, kept up a close relationship with his friend Walter Pichler, the illustrator and object artist. Like Domenig, Pichler had experienced a partly traumatic childhood in a rural region during the Nazi era (Domenig in Carinthia, Pichler in Tyrol). Through an archaising work phase (together with Hans Hollein, 1962 – 67) and a technoid period with experiments in pneumatic structures (Prototypen, 1966 – 69),[4] Pichler had initially arrived at “Land Art” in model form and then, with the purchase of a small farmstead in St. Martin in southern Burgenland, soon developed a full-scale, individualistic version of “Land Art”. Artificial landscapes took on the metaphorical shape of sceneries that had emotional-autobiographical significance for the artist.[5] In this way, he was able to permanently construct those ideal spatial-sculptural constellations that in exhibitions could only be realised temporarily at most.
Domenig not only shared biographical parallels and influences with Pichler but also a great passion for drawing and technical aptitude, which manifested itself in the complex structure of Pichler’s sculptures and in Domenig’s advanced building constructions. In the Z building in the Favoriten district of Vienna, Domenig linked all three factors in an emblematic way: the coloured design drawings combine expressive, fantastical pictorial motifs[6] with elaborate construction details, while the constructive elements of the suspended construction of the upper floors,[7] the organoid scaled metal façade and the steel framework of the glazed banking hall ceiling celebrate a sensual, technical tour de force. Furthermore, a bold personal expression was created – the sprayed concrete casting of a console in the shape of his hugely enlarged right hand.
For the Viennese architects of the time, this “wild” combination of technically elaborate free forms and highly individualistic “additions” by the architect represented a radical contrast to their more deliberate modernist tradition: established architects such as Roland Rainer, Karl Schwanzer and Ernst Hiesmayr were more focused on building strategies that could be standardised rather than an individualistic approach. Somewhat younger architects such as Arbeitsgruppe 4 (Holzbauer-Kurrent-Spalt) as well as J.G. Gsteu, Ottokar Uhl and Harry Glück were investigating serial building along the lines of Konrad Wachsmann[8] in connection with evolved cultures. Domenig’s generational peers Hans Hollein and Hermann Czech explored postmodern “space-time navigation” between history, psychology and space travel design. And, around 1970, the ten-years-younger architectural rebels of the Technische Hochschule around Coop Himmelb(l)au and Haus-Rucker Co. were still far from having arrived at actual building operations.
None of the building architects in Vienna had aspired to anywhere near as formally radical a solution in a standard construction project like a bank branch[9] as Domenig did with his unexpected coup, which he interpreted in his own way: “The architects there come out of the Viennese tradition. Even though they might not want to, they cannot distance themselves from the influence of such giants as Hoffmann, Loos and Wagner. That’s their problem: they are trying to overcome this tradition step by step. Coming from the outside, I was able to sidestep this problem. How valuable this has been, I cannot say, but the Viennese architects have not yet been able to do it. Secondly, Vienna is well known for being overwhelmed with officialdom. The Viennese architects have not succeeded in overcoming their bureaucracy either. I was able to overcome both the Viennese tradition and the Viennese bureaucracy, and since my building has been built, Viennese architects no longer have any excuse.”[10]
The rejection of Viennese conditions strengthened Domenig’s enduring conviction that he could not, indeed must not, express historical references but could and should instead reflect his own personality in architecture. Ironically, this reaction ignores the fact that it was precisely in Viennese Modernism around 1900 that Sigmund Freud had succeeded in the cultural discovery of the soul. Based on this, Josef Frank, Oskar Strnad and Felix Augenfeld had developed a psychologically accentuated architecture, which, however, did not gain a lasting foothold due to the expulsions during the Nazi era. At the time when Domenig built the Z in Vienna, it continued to have an effect only very indirectly in allusive interiors such as Hermann Czech’s Kleines Café from 1970, where Domenig also met with the local avant-garde around Walter Pichler.
Industrialisation and individualisation
Pursued with relish, the conflict between Domenig and “the Viennese” was based on the fundamental cultural issue – still contentious today – of whether builders or architects should or may express themselves in an individualistic way at all through their buildings in public space. With the advent of the industrial age, this debate gained new momentum due to the division of labour and mechanisation. This led to consequential specialisations, such as the separation of design and execution, but also of construction and cladding (for example, iron constructions under stone coverings). Architectural theory now examined in detail the aesthetic questions of cladding (Gottfried Semper) and a systematised building typology (Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand), but barely addressed the many radically new technologies of the time, which were left to the specialists: the engineers. It was Otto Wagner who first defined building construction as a potentially artistic medium that went beyond a purely technical fulfilment of purpose (“utility”), because “new purposes and new constructions must give birth to new forms. […] The architect must always develop the art form from the construction.”[11] The traditional role of cladding as an almost exclusive means of expression in architecture was over – although Otto Wagner did not (yet) answer the question of what content the new art form should actually represent. At the least, it ought not conceal its provenance, as Wagner himself demonstrated in the industrial “tectonics” of his station buildings for the Wiener Stadtbahn. The same applies to new materials such as aluminium, to which Wagner assigned limited aesthetic special tasks in the context of his overall artistic concept (Postsparkasse, Vienna, 1902-12). The “Neues Bauen” raised this to the bold aesthetic dominance of new materials and constructions, for example, in Mies van der Rohe’s curved glass walls and chrome-plated steel supports with a cross-shaped cross-section. But it was still an “objective”, technical-aesthetic content that architecture expressed here, and not so much the subjective feeling of a designer.
Where was this debate at the time of Günther Domenig’s architectural socialisation? His teachers at what was then the Technische Hochschule in Graz, Friedrich Zotter and Karl Raimund Lorenz, ascribed barely any form-giving power or intrinsic aesthetic value to construction – for example, in their Elisabeth-Hochhaus (1954 – 64).[12] However, this was quite different in the nearby industrial context of the Upper Styrian steelworks, where architect Emmerich Donau built a number of halls for the then Alpine Montan-AG, as well as exhibition, administrative, school and residential buildings.[13] Eilfried Huth, Domenig’s partner in the early years, worked as a freelancer for Donau from 1956 to 1962 and planned a school, an office tower, a residential and commercial building and an exhibition building with him.[14] This resulted in some striking steel skeleton-frame structures. The highlight was the cantilevered corten steel construction of the Forschungs- und Rechenzentrum in Leoben, built with Domenig from 1970 – 73. The semantics of these constructions, however, continued to refer to the material and not to people, let alone their feelings: the discussion around “personal expression” in architecture had made little real progress in Austria since 1900. This was different in the West: a widely received “individualisation” of architecture as art making use of the largely free formability of reinforced concrete began as early as 1950 with Le Corbusier’s famous Pilgrimage Church of Ronchamp. In Switzerland, the sculptor-architect Walter Förderer adopted this from 1959 with his famous sculptural exposed concrete buildings (“Brutalism”). And in England during the same year, James Stirling and James Gowan began their pioneering Engineering Building at the University of Leicester, which demonstrated a great variety of steel constructions, but also highly expressive forms of the massive building components – both later also the case in Domenig’s Z.
Mies and Corbusier,[15] Förderer and Stirling provided crucial artistic inspiration for the young Domenig-Huth team, which was formed in 1963 together with lawyer and musician Erich Kleinschuster for the competition and construction of the large exposed concrete complex of the Pädagogische Akademie der Diözese Graz. Despite the sculptural design, this spectacular building premiere – and also the later Pfarrzentrum in Oberwart (1966−69) – did not yet demonstrate a personal signature, if only because of the number of planners involved, but rather a kind of encyclopaedia of the design possibilities of a construction method.[16] In 1966 Domenig and Huth, who were in close contact with Walter Förderer, presented his touring exhibition and publication Schweizer Architekten vor dem Dilemma des heutigen Bauens[17] in Innsbruck and Graz, thus also making a contribution to the spread of Brutalism.
Creative Paradox
Between the construction of the Pädagogische Akademie in Graz and that of the Z in Vienna, Domenig, together with Huth, assimilated many other ideas from Western Modernism with remarkable speed and elasticity. For the Graz architects, England was always a more influential source of inspiration than Vienna – perhaps because of the British occupation of Styria and Carinthia from 1945 – 55. Austria’s southern states, it seems, absorbed the developments of the dawning consumer age primarily from Great Britain, France and Switzerland, while Vienna favoured those from Germany, Scandinavia and the USA.[18]
Particular inspiration for Domenig’s path to his own expression came from structuralism, membrane construction and Pop Art. Domenig and Huth contributed emblematic projects and realisations to all three international trends typical of that time. Just five years after Kenzo Tange’s Tokyo Bay Plan (1960), they enhanced structuralism with their pioneering study Neue Wohnform Ragnitz, one of the most sophisticated projects of flexible, expandable urbanistic systems, consisting of large primary constructions and inserted organoid space-cells.[19] The competition project for the extension of the University of Vienna (1973÷74) would also have become a major international work of structuralism, had it been realised. Domenig and Huth took up the zeitgeisty lightweight construction methods with membrane structures made of innovative plastics, which were tested across the world during the 1960s in free-formed and pre-stressed roof surfaces, as inflatable volumes or as enveloping surfaces over rod frameworks, in the design of the trigon 67 exhibition Ambiente at the Graz Künstlerhaus, in the large-scale tourism project Floraskin for Morocco (1971) and in two smaller-scale contributions to the Olympic buildings in Munich (1972). And Pop Art with its walk-in, large-scale anthropomorphic sculptures (Niki de Saint Phalle with J. Tinguely and P.O. Ultvedt, HON [Sie], Stockholm 1966; Roland Goeschl, Sackgasse, Vienna 1967) led the young Graz architects to a semantically very ambiguous but lasting everyday usability in the form of the sprayed concrete construction of the Multipurpose Hall at the Schulschwestern in Graz (1974−77). After this, the partnership ended: Domenig radicalised his individualism further and further in advanced constructions through to the Steinhaus (“This built ME”,[20] from 1982 on), while Huth took the exact opposite path with the collectivisation of the planning process in participatory projects.
Günther Domenig is one of the few architects who sustainably achieved a productive combination of the two contrary paths of Modernism: the Lebensreform movement, critical of industry, called for meaningful strategies of self-realisation, while the technology-enthusiastic faction aspired to a comprehensive standardisation and mechanisation of civilisation. In a revolutionary way, Domenig brought together these poles in a creative paradox by systematically transforming anonymous industrial technologies and using them to design highly personal environments. From the 1960s onwards, he used handcrafting methods to realise iconic sculptural buildings whose formal and constructive individualism only became buildable for everyone with today’s digital planning and production methods. As a consequence, the position of individualism in construction should be a matter of detailed discussion again today.
Sources:
[1] A description of this intensive phase of life and work is given by Domenig’s then-colleague Volker Giencke: “Inmitten der Ewigkeit”. Für GÜNTHER DOMENIG. Gedanken an einen Freund, 16.6.2012, www.gat.st
[2] Drawing on dreams. Günther Domenig in conversation with Peter Cook and Alvon Boyarsky, September 1986, in: AA files 1986, p. 100
[3] Artur Perotti and Anton Potyka, Hauptsitz der Zentralsparkasse der Gemeinde Wien (Z), Vordere Zollamtsstraße 13, 1962 – 65. – In collaboration with Peter Podsedensek, Domenig converted the building into the headquarters of Bank Austria in 1986 – 1992.
[4] Pneumatic sculptures by Hollein and Pichler were presented around 1967 as part of Kulturtage Kapfenberg. – Sabine Breitwieser (ed.), Pichler: Prototypen 1966 – 69, Generali Foundation, Salzburg (Residenz) 1998, also the exhibition Pichler. Radikal. Architektur & Prototypen, Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, 2016/17
[5] Walter Pichler, Relief der Gegend, in der ich geboren bin, drawing, 1970
[6] Stylistic parallels can be found in the painting of the “Wirklichkeiten” (Realities) group around Peter Pongratz and Forum Stadtpark in Graz.
[7] Domenig and Huth had already built the FRZ Leoben (1970−73) as a suspended structure, and Karl Schwanzer (BMW-Hochhaus in Munich, 1968 – 72) and Ernst Hiesmayr (Juridicum in Vienna, 1970 – 84) also used this construction method.
[8] Matthias Boeckl, “Eine neue Anonymität des Bauens auf technischer Grundlage. Konrad Wachsmann, die Rationalisierungsvision der Moderne und ihre Folgen in Österreich”, in: Klaus Bollinger and Florian Medicus (eds.), Stressing Wachsmann. Strukturen für eine Zukunft, Basel (Birkhäuser) 2020, pp. 67 – 89
[9] Friedrich Kurrent and Johannes Spalt, Zentralsparkasse Floridsdorf, Vienna 1974
[10] See note 2
[11] Otto Wagner, Die Baukunst unserer Zeit, 4th edition, Vienna (Schroll) 1914, p. 60
[12] On the “Graz School”, see Anselm Wagner (ed.), Was bleibt von der “Grazer Schule”? Architekturutopien seit den 1960ern revisited, Berlin (Jovis) 2012, also Celeste Williams, The Grazer Schule – Dynamic Austrian Architecture, phil. Diss., University of Applied Arts, Vienna 2021
[13] Friedrich Achleitner, Österreichische Architektur im 20. Jahrhundert, Band II, Kärnten, Steiermark, Burgenland, Salzburg (Residenz) 1983 (ten mentions of Donau’s buildings)
[14] Juliane Zach (ed.); Eilfried Huth, Architekt. Varietät als Prinzip, Berlin (Gebr. Mann) 1996, pp. 9 – 12 and 130 – 132
[15] “The fixed stars for us TH students – Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe – more ‘Mies’ than ‘Corbu’ for me, followed by Craig Ellwood.” Eilfried Huth, in: Zach 1996, cit. Note 14, p. 11
[16] Peter Cook (cit. Note 2): “It’s an extremely competent piece of Brutalism – rather a good building and certainly up to the standard of Lyons, Israel and Ellis, the firm which produced the best buildings in this manner in Great Britain during the early 1960s. You obviously understood the language of concrete and steel very well.”
[17] Walter Förderer et al. (eds.), Schweizer Architekten vor dem Dilemma heutigen Bauens, Basel und Aesch 1966; exhibition among others at Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, 21.6. – 3.7.1966
[18] Wilhelm Holzbauer and Hans Hollein completed studies and internships in the USA in the late 1950s, Hollein also in Sweden.
[19] In 1969, the architects successfully presented a (lost) large model of the project at the Grand Prix International d’Urbanisme et d’Architecture in Cannes before a prominent jury that included J. B. Bakema, Jürgen Joedicke, Louis Kahn, Jean Prouvé, Karl Schwanzer, Heikki Siren and Bruno Zevi. A reconstruction model was purchased by the FRAC Centre in Orléans in 2001. Another reconstruction was made for the exhibition “Wir Günther Domenig” curated by Michael Zinganel at Kunsthaus Mürz, 22.10. 2022 to 4.2.2023.
[20] After Maria Ozea, www. domenigsteinhaus.at