This section of the exhibition is wholly dedicated to Günther Domenig’s central project, his most personal and at the same time most sculptural work, the Steinhaus in Steindorf on Lake Ossiach. The circumstances of simultaneously assuming the role of client, financier and inhabitant of the building created a situation that allowed the architect to push his personal and constructional boundaries. Its planning and realisation took over thirty years in total.
It is Günther Domenig’s great life’s work, a built architectural manifesto defined by the will for artistic expression. In none of his other projects is the medium of drawing as important as it is at the Steinhaus. It documents the design and form-finding process over the course of more than six years and tells of the importance and independence of the medium itself.
The Steinhaus is the “manifestation” and visualisation of his own intentions in their clearest and most uncompromising form. It is a concrete place with clear functions – corresponding to the typology of a residential house with a kitchen, living room, bedroom, washrooms, – and at the same time a statement of total expression; a place where the role and function of architecture finds reflection, as does the question of the desire to understand architecture as art.
