Utopias
As a reaction to post-war Austria, which was dominated by conservative catholicism, from the 1960s onwards a younger generation of architects pushed for social critique: various movements of the Austrian architectural and artistic avantgarde, from Viennese Actionism to the Graz School and beyond, were united in their rejection of the old. The boundaries between architecture, art and activism blurred and there was a call – among other things – for the radical rethinking of architecture, the challenging of existing social, aesthetic and formal structures and a search for subjectivity.
Günther Domenig’s phase of utopianism is closely linked to his partnership with Eilfried Huth. Many of their projects remained on the level of thought experiments that manifested themselves in sketches and models. In some cases, they were never intended for structural realisation, but stood under the claim of the radically new and different.
Some of their buildings – such as the Schulschwestern school or the church centre in Oberwart – are still iconic of their time and the architects. Others, such as Trigon 67 and the additions and extensions to the Olympic swimming hall in Munich, were from the outset intended as temporary architectures in keeping with the zeitgeist of the scene, their disappearance being part of the concept. While the early buildings of the 1960s leaned heavily on the aesthetics of brutalism, the later projects reveal a development towards an organic expression, which appears increasingly selfdetermined and finds a high point in the Z‑Sparkasse in the Favoriten district of Vienna. This marks the beginning of Domenig’s independent architectural work and the end of his partnership with Eilfried Huth.
