Günther Domenig: Structures That Fit My Nature

Architecture Laboratory Styria: Part 1

New York, NY...With a career dating back to the 1960s, architect Günther Domenig has achieved cult-figure status among peers internationally for public and private commissions - from houses and interiors to hospitals, banks, and university centers in Austria and Germany - displaying an intensely personal building language. Describing his work as a "sensory embodiment of ideas" and an exploration of "subjective dimensions of site - dark memory, lived experience, and self-image," Domenig makes architecture that is elaborate, muscular, and defiantly individualistic. His aesthetic, defying category is rooted in a singular and poetic vision of the role that both architects and their efforts play in our world. Domenig, considered one of Europe's foremost living architects, is little known to the American public. Only weeks ago, however, he received the Golden Lion Award at the 2004 Ninth International Architecture Biennale in Venice.

On No vember 16th, the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York City will unveil the exhibition GüntherDomenig: Structures That Fit My Nature, the first American spotlight on the 70-year-old innovator's career. Curated by Charlotte Pöchhacker, director of the Graz Biennial for Media and Architecture, the exhibition will fill the public viewing spaces of the Forum tower, designed by Domenig's contemporary, countryman, and fellow innovator Raimund Abraham. The exhibition will remain on view through January 8, 2005.

Featuring models, drawings, sketches, objects, and photographs, Günther Domenig: Structures That Fit My Nature will focus entirely upon the architect's two most personal and revealing works: The new Documentation Center of the National Socialist Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg, Germany, completed in 2001, and the Steinhaus (Stone House), an astonishing residential compound first imagined by Domenig for h imself in 1977. Both are Domenig's undisputed masterpieces.

The Documentation Center in Nuremberg is Domenig's attempt to "break the force of violence" with an oppositional gesture, transforming the former congress hall at the onetime Nazi Party rally grounds into a documentation center. The work is a daring, even soaring response to one of history's greatest tragedies. The massive axial structure of the original building is bisected by a new, diagonal construction made of light glass and steel - a near-metaphysical redirection of energy from the bleak to the hopeful.

In contrast to the public declaration that is the Nuremburg Documentation Center, the Steinhaus is a very private and complex walk-in sculpture in a rural location. Begun in 1986 and under continuous expansion since, it is described as Domenig's "built manifesto." The house is a private laboratory for his ideas about the relationship between design and landscape, self and context, poetic and spat ial. With a non-profit foundation now established for the Steinhaus, Domenig intends it to become a place where other architects and artists can work and exchange ideas and information. American architect Thom Mayne describes the building: "Energy, not normally a visible quality, is made palpable through this work... Located in Nowhere, Austria, [Domenig's] Steinhaus masterpiece is uncompromised, pure, and expressive, and as such is about Domenig himself."

Günther Domenig: Structures That Fit My Nature is the prolog of exhibitions included in the project Architecture Laboratory Styria, conceived to build awareness of the creative contributions made by practitioners of the Austrian region. The program has been made possible by the State Government of Styria and INSTYRIA, co-organizer with ARTIMAGE.

Günther Domenig - Recent Work, in English and German, edited by Matthias Boeckl and with a preface by Thom Mayne, will be published by Springer this fall.

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