Raimund Abraham and Günther Domenig

“I’M VERY BAD AT DRAWING SOMETHING THAT EXISTS.”

Günther Domenig and Raimund Abraham had a number of things in common: a life­long friendship that went back to their studies together, both were members of the football club at Graz University of Technology, they had ties to their home region (Raimund was born in East Tyrol) and the fact that drawing played a key role in their work. Like Domenig, Abraham did not draw mainly for builders but rather for himself. Drawing has an autonomous reality, it manifests something that is detached from the (im)possibilities of built architecture.

This is also due to the use of geometry and the geometric form as the language of the ideal, which transcends the buildable in its materiality. An ideal that can therefore never be realized. Not because the lines, corners and edges cannot be built, but because geometry stands for itself and can be shaped infinitely. This field of tension – between the ideal of geometry and the built work or, in other words, between form and function – no doubt fascinated both of them: Raimund Abraham and Günther Domenig.