Raimund Abraham was an architect and architectural philosopher of the Austrian postwar avant-garde, which vociferously opposed convention. His sketches, fragments, and texts are characterized by protest as a stance; they are utopias and visionary urban models. Abraham’s world of ideas is presented in the bilingual volume Raimund Abraham: On Architecture. Texte und Skizzen, Thoughts and Sketches, published by Kettler Verlag.
Florian Heilmeyer
Raimund Abraham: On Architecture. Texte und Skizzen, Thoughts and Sketches, Egidio Marzona (ed.), Kettler Verlag, Bönen 2025 → oder now
Raimund Johann Abraham (1933–2010) belonged to a generation that sought change with force and vocal protest—a different kind of architecture as an expression of a different society following the civilizational rupture of the Holocaust, in which Austria, too, bore some responsibility. Abraham’s first utopian and visionary drawings and futuristic urban models were created, in part, in collaboration with Pichler and Hollein. This was followed in 1967 by the joint exhibition Visionary Architecture by the three architects at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Philosophy and Architecture
Abraham was also a self-made cosmopolitan. His father was a cellar master from South Tyrol; his mother, who was from East Tyrol, remained a homemaker and took care of the children. Raimund Abraham escaped this confines; after completing his studies, he traveled through Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland, and then made several trips to Mexico over the course of five years. As early as 1958, the year he graduated, he had won an international competition for a cultural center in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) in the Congo. Finally, in 1964, his fellow student from Graz, Friedrich St. Florian, invited him to teach at the Rhode Island School of Design. Abraham packed his bags and emigrated, quickly establishing himself as a professor of architecture with teaching assignments all over the world and eventually becoming an “architectural philosopher,” as he was often called. Harvard, Yale, Houston, London, Strasbourg, and Copenhagen—and finally, starting in the 1980s, Graz and Salzburg again—were some of the stops along his teaching career.
„Building is a process of thinking“
He didn’t build much. His most significant completed work is the Austrian Cultural Forum (2002) in New York, which he himself described as a “guillotine” because of the theater auditorium’s slanted cantilever. Abraham often emphasized that architecture doesn’t necessarily have to be built; architecture already comes into being with paper and pencil—building is merely the final step in the thought process. “Building is a process of thinking” was his credo.
Notes, Poems, Fragments
This small, largely enigmatic publication from the Egidio Marzona Archive of the Avant-Gardes, published by Kettler Verlag, should be understood in exactly the same way. Printed here in no particular order are notes, poems, statements, excerpts from interviews, and other fragments, sketches, and typewritten pages by Abraham. According to the blurb, they are “reproduced in the (dis)order in which Raimund Abraham left them.” German texts are accompanied by an English translation; the English texts remain in their original form.
Flying and Traveling
So, with a sense of wonder, one flips through the pages and realizes that this brief stroll through Abraham’s notes has a charm all its own. You come across sketches of a “birdcage for large and rare birds,” unspecified studies of a site plan or for a “house in the countryside,” and briefly read fragments of thoughts on travel, on flying, on the city—or on the transformation of a bird: “When the pelican realized that his affection was increasingly going unreciprocated, his metamorphosis was no longer applicable. He gazed in amazement at the transformation of the image he knew so well and had only one wish: to be able to write like Pessoa.”
Nothing is actually explained here.
Raimund Abraham: On Architecture. Texte und Skizzen, Thoughts and Sketches
Egidio Marzona (ed.)
160 pages | 16,6 x 24 cm, de/en
Kettler Verlag
Bönen 2025
ISBN 978-3-98741-209-7
