Abraham lived for and fought for the architecture’s development, living through technical utopias and contemplating architecture in its revolutionary dimension, his visions constantly at the forefront. Uncompromising in his demands for architecture, he developed a fundamental architectural language and dealt with “imagination” as it relates to architecture as an autonomous art. In his approach to architecture, he was primarily concerned about the imagination and perception of ideas: “the idea is dimensionless, and from the moment it becomes visual – and therewith dimensional – it is already a solution, already a translation. A drawing is autonomous, not a preliminary step. To me, the sheet of paper is the place, and to me, architecture is an intervention in this place.”

As a nonconformist and a fundamental critic and champion of architectural form, Abraham campaigned tirelessly for architecture’s collective renewal. If, during architecture’s long history, an architectonic form had to be identified as something special, true and singular in order to be recognized as architecture, then today every form can be thought of as a mere example of a potentially infinite number of forms, of which each one would earn an equal right to be regarded as architecture. Raimund Abraham subjected this notion of the equivalence of all forms, facilitated by modernist architecture, to questioning scrutiny.

With the realization of the pioneering construction of the new Austrian Cultural Forum Building in New York – a tall structure with a waterfall-like glass-and-aluminum façade, standing around 20 stories high while being a mere 7.6 meters wide – he developed and fought for an exemplary sort of architecture which was hotly debated during its ten-year construction phase (1992-2002), but which today stands as an architectonic “flagship of a modern cultural nation” and is one of the few works of architecture that Raimund Abraham actually succeeded in realizing – a dramatic example of neglected opportunities and an eternal loss for our present and our future.

Abraham maintained a very special, decades-long relationship with both the MAK in Vienna and the MAK Center Los Angeles. He was one of those individuals who supported me personally in the reorientation of the Museum of Applied Arts during the 1980s. He also participated in the programmatic exhibition Wiener Bauplätze. Verschollene Träume – Angewandte Programme. Wien um 1986 [Viennese Construction Sites. Lost Dreams – Applied Programs. Vienna in 1986] and participated in the concurrent MAK lecture series Architektur oder Bauen?: Eigensinn oder Illusion – Fragmente zu einem Programm der neuen architektonischen Kultur [Architecture or Construction? Fragments for a Program of the New Architectural Culture]. In 1991, he designed an extraordinary project—the Kugel-Projekt—for the MAK Terrace Plateau. His architectural models and sketches were among the very first objects to be purchased for the MAK Collection of Contemporary Art, including the project Kirche an der Berliner Mauer [Church at the Berlin Wall] (1981–82) and the Hinge-Chair (1971) from the series Destruction of Objects. Most recently, Abraham had been preparing his contribution to the MAK exhibition AustriaDavaj!, which is to take place in 2011 at the MUAR / Schusev State Museum of Architecture in Moscow.

Abraham understood architecture in its potential and as a process of transformation. Steeled by the conviction that architecture bears witness to human existence and that human beings themselves have to actually make architecture, he took on architecture at its most original, fundamental level and sketched out a "poetry of the archetypical.” His philosophical approach to architecture is articulated in numerous comprehensive texts and books. In 1964 he published the book Elementare Architektur. Architectonics; at issue for him was architecture devoid of attributes, untouched by external influences, using the simplest of means, and organically grown during the construction process.
“Memory and longing: that is architecture. Built and unbuilt.” His architecture shall forever be engraved in our thoughts.

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