Permanent Collection 20th/21st Century Architecture

Designing artist: Manfred Wakolbinger

Permanent Collection space 1993–2012

Space for Architecture
The glass wall promises a view - of the city and of utopias.
Spread out in the room - spaces.
On the small desks rest ideas, imagined and built.
A new world opens up through every glass cover on every table.
One can discern the manifested object in the images on the wall.
Lebbeus Wood’s manifesto written on the wall links everything together. / Manfred Wakolbinger

The architecture area includes models and drawings by Raimund Abraham, Günther Domenig, Driendl*Steixner, Frank O. Gehry, Zaha Hadid, John Hejduk, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Frederick J. Kiesler, Daniel Libeskind, Thom Mayne -Morphosis Architects, Eric Owen Moss, Carl Pruscha, Helmut Richter, Rudolph M.Schindler, and Lebbeus Woods.
(Applied) art must also mean questioning the relationship between art and function, between art and everyday life.
The works of the architects shown in this room demonstrate and document a point of view in which the yardstick for architecture is its universal character.
No matter how varied individual positions may be, all the architects represented in the collection have one characteristic in common: they are concerned with a new type of architectural thinking. All of them tell us that there is no longer any prescribed path laid out for contemporary architecture. Utopian architectural visions, ideal proposals, projections of a bridge between rationality and manifestation stand alongside pro-jects that test architecture in terms of its social usefulness. / Peter Noever (curator of the MAK Contemporary Art Collection during the phase of the reinstallation of the MAK Permanent Collection in the early 1990s)