Dietmar STEIN bids farewell to the AzW with the 20th Vienna Architecture Congress.

Dietmar STEIN has been an observer and player in the international architectural discourse for around four decades. He founded the Architekturzentrum Wien in 1993 and is now ending his work there. Not only for reasons of age, but also because he has become pessimistic, as he says: “…I must confess that I am no longer interested in contemporary business architecture. In recent years, universities have produced too many architects who only want to be successful on the market as service providers…”

He has organized 19 architecture congresses and bid farewell last weekend with the 20th edition. But not on just any topic, no, he reviewed every single decade since 1960: Over two days, there was a lecture on each decade followed by a discussion. Protagonists from that time were invited to the podium, a long illustrious list that attracted many listeners: Rob Krier, Jacques Herzog, Dominique Perrault, Hermann Czech, Wiel Arets, Nathalie de Vries, Roger Diener, STEIN Holl, Bart Lootsma, Peter Märkli, Wolf Prix, Bruno Reichlin and many more – Dietmar Steiner’s companions from his “architectural socialization”, as it was called.

A good concept: the older gentlemen report, the younger generation provides the moderators and the questions. But as is often the case with such a wealth of contributions, the audience soon got the feeling that the architectural celebrities, who had traveled a long way to be there, did not get to speak enough, were not allowed to talk at length about what it was like back then and, above all, how they see their own history today, because there was far too little time. Especially as the debates, with the exception of one discussion, were held in English: So there was a danger with a lack of knowledge of the language – which no one can be blamed for – that the statements were greatly simplified, even trivialized. There was hardly any conversation on the podium, with one short statement following another and no questions from the audience.

But of course there were many remarkable moments in this architectural history marathon: For example, when Jacques Herzog said about his teacher Aldo Rossi – in German, by the way, in his strong language – that he admired him as a student, but was disillusioned when he visited the Gallarartese residential row in Milan again and found only a “built drawing”. Or when Wilfried Wang surprisingly spread the hope in the much-vaunted times of crisis that creativity today comes from the more innovative third world and that architects there are in the process of finding solutions to the problems of our time. Or when Wolf Prix stated that today everyone is “afraid of the future, whereas in the sixties people believed in the future”. Or when Rob Krier sternly admonished architects to develop their own “signature style without offending the cities”.

There was also a successful introduction to the congress by Jean-Louis Cohen, who sensitively brought the post-war period back to life for the audience and prepared them for the decades to come. As well as a particularly successful conclusion with Juhani Pallasmaa: the great, old, wise Finnish gentleman of architectural history advised in a profound essay for less excitement, more prudence and modesty: no fear of repetition, “let’s repeat ourselves”.

What remains? There will be an issue of the magazine Arch+ on the congress in the middle of next year, and you can visit an exhibition worth seeing at the AzW until March 20, 2017: Curators Karoline Mayer, Sonja Pisarek and Katharina Ritter have not let Steiner’s pessimism get to them and have put together an optimistic show with interesting buildings as cornerstones of the decades. They were able to translate Dietmar STEIN’s attitude that architecture is at an end into the title “At the End: Architecture. Time travel 1959 – 2019”.
Incidentally, Angelika Fitz will take over the management of the AzW in the new year and we will introduce her in more detail in our February issue.

Photos: eSel.at / Lorenz Seidler

David Ganz has written an extremely knowledgeable history of medieval book bindings. Whether the book exists as an object of artistic design or is drowning in the euphoria of digital marketing ideas – David Ganz cannot answer this question. However, there is no doubt that there are wonderful book bindings. Especially not for David Ganz, Professor of Art History of the […]

David Ganz has written an extremely knowledgeable history of medieval book bindings.

Whether the book exists as an object of artistic design or is drowning in the euphoria of digital marketing ideas – David Ganz cannot answer this question. However, there is no doubt that there are wonderful book bindings. Especially not for David Ganz, Professor of Medieval Art History at the University of Zurich and author of the recently published book “Buch-Gewänder – Prachteinbände im Mittelalter”. However, Ganz complains at the beginning of his richly illustrated, highly complex and fascinating study, which delves deep into medieval religious thought, that the “weight of holy books as aesthetically designed sacramentals is dramatically underexposed in more recent accounts”. Ganz’s book stands against this trend, which, like any good pictorial description, not only opens the reader’s eyes to details, but also places its subject in its time. It is clear that details of splendid bindings of the Gospels and liturgical texts require a great deal of basic knowledge, but this is not a prerequisite for the author. And that is a very good thing, because there is much to explain about medieval thought.

These explanations are often highly theoretical, but extremely exciting. For example, when Ganz explains the depictions of the Genoels-Elderen book cover from the Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire in Brussels: “The motif of Mary with spindle and skirt was frequently found in late antique Byzantine pictorial art, but rather rare in Western art. These paintings are based on the stories of the apocryphal Protoevangelium Jacobi, according to which Mary was stretching purple for the temple curtain at the moment of the Annunciation. In the early Middle Ages, the motif of Mary’s handiwork in book covers appears again, albeit in a much more symbolic form: “The Christian interpretation of the veil, which Paul develops in the Letter to the Hebrews, speaks of the veil of the flesh and thus refers to the incarnate Christ himself. The Jewish curtain in front of the Holy of Holies is reinterpreted here as the garment into which Christ slips at the incarnation. Mary’s role as the Mother of God, as can often be read in the literature of the Church Fathers, was that of a robe-giver.” This depiction in turn serves to adorn a garment – the book garment, which is made of ivory. The precious white ivory was regarded as a symbol of Mary’s virginity, from whose flesh Christ was born. The artistically perforated surface of the picture “imprints the flesh-like material with its own enveloping quality”, writes Ganz.

The web of meaning that is uncovered here corresponds with the artistic design of the book covers, which were often boxes that housed the Gospels. This is why Ganz, using the example of the wonderful Uta Codex of 1020/30 from a Regensburg goldsmith’s workshop, speaks of vestments on two levels “On the first level, the binding is a decorative ornament of the Gospel book made of precious materials. This is the exterior-interior relationship constitutive of our genre. On a second level, the binding is the carrier for an image that represents the body of Christ. In this image, Christ himself is already wrapped in a robe. The wearer of the robe, who has taken his place in such full form on a throne, is a figurative image body that is only made available by the book cover itself. “But that is not all: when a book is taken out of the book case for reading, it is undressed and made to sound through the reading. When the book was put back into the box after the reading, “the codex filled with characters was reunited with its pictorial cover, which indicated the presence of Christ in the Gospel book for the entire remaining part of the Mass.”

Such an explanation is nothing short of breathtaking. Explanations of the book held in the hand of a Christ depicted on a book case lead even deeper into medieval thinking: “The figure of the ruler of heaven represents a person constituted by the book, in this book.”

These examples, which are only excerpted here, already show the huge wealth of knowledge that David Ganz spreads out. And which is not only of immense value in terms of religious history, history and art history, but must be the basis of any study of medieval book bindings.

David Ganz “Buch-Gewänder -Prachteinbände im Mittelalter”, Reimer Verlag, 368 p., 79 Euro