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margherita spiluttini. räumlich Cover: German --> go to english edition (cover) ISBN 978 3 901756 85 6 319 Pages, approx. 250 illustrations Pubisher: Architekturzentrum Wien Contents Foreword by Dietmar Steiner The Stillness of the Object. Monika Faber 1 Facies. Portrait of an Urban History / Friedrich Achleiter 2 House Wittgenstein / Otto Kapfinger Materialized Philosophy 3 Shape of Time / Arno Ritter, Werner Durth Conversation 4 Trouvé / Allison und Peter Smithson The ‘As Found’ and the ‘Found’ 5 Order System Disorder / Rainer Fuchs 6 The Alps / Thomas Bernhard 7 Infiltration Reflection / John Berger 8 Building Body / Christiane Zintzen The Trap: Body and Building 9 Laban Creekside / Rudolf Laban 10 Inside Insight / Cathrin Pichler Inside – Insight 11 Alluding Deluding / Julian Schutting Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper Biography Bibliography Foreword Margherita Spiluttini’s career begins with her training as a medical technical assistant in Innsbruck, where she learnt medical photography. She then went to Vienna to work at a nuclear medicine outpatient clinic. At this time already, photographic precision was an, if only methodological, job condition. She was still far from thinking of working as an independent photographer when, 1970, she married Adolf Krischanitz, who was exploring new forms of architecture in installations, performances, and experimental films together with a group named ‘Missing Link’. It was only after the birth of her daughter Ina that she started photographing, just like that, without any artistic ambition at first. Generally and in the eyes of the public, photography in Austria was reportage, a trade; there was no course of studies offered at an art academy, there was no photo gallery; and in the art market, photography was neither present nor at all a subject of discussion. So Margherita was increasingly doing reportages beyond what had begun as a hobby: for the Stimme der Frau [Women’s Voice], a magazine edited by the Austrian Communist Party, about the autonomous youth scene in a squatted building in Vienna’s Gassergasse, reportages for the Wiener magazine, but also about pop concerts. It was the eighties which ushered in a new era of photography in Austria. And Margherita Spiluttini authorized me to take this time for the real beginning of her career. Around the Forum Stadtpark movement, Camera Austria was established by Christine Frisinghelli and Manfred Willmann. Symposiums and the publication of a magazine of the same name from 1980 helped Austrian photography to develop a new self-image. For Margherita Spiluttini, Camera Austria was the basis on which an entirely new dimension of her own interest unfolded. Following on the approach taken by the American ‘New Topographers’, she realized and claimed for herself the independent artistic value of documented everyday life, of the ostensibly marginal. This view of the photographic gaze found its opportunity when, in the early 1980s Otto Kapfinger and myself, following Friedrich Achleitner and by initiative of cultural editor Franz Endler, started writing regular architecture reviews for the Austrian daily Die Presse and commissioned Margherita Spiluttini to supply the photos to go with the articles. And when we were given the chance to publish the first Vienna Architecture Guide for the Vienna Municipality, we decided to have all buildings included photographed by Margherita Spilluttini. For Margherita, this was, she says today, her entrance ticket into professional architectural photography. More and more architects came to recognize the quality of her photographs and hired her for photo portfolios of their built projects. One may thus contend with a clear conscience that Austrian architectural photography was newly established by Margherita Spiluttini in the 1980s. And architects in general realized that a ‘foreign gaze’, a professional view of their buildings also afforded them new insights into their own work. Margherita Spiluttini’s international career started in the early 1990s. The Ricola Warehouse by Herzog & de Meuron was her first international piece of work. She subsequently became the ‘court photographer’ of the Swiss architects. Many others followed. Today, as is evidenced by her numerous invitations to present her work at the Venice Architecture Biennale since 1991, Margherita counts among the top ten of international architectural photography. It is owed to her that commissioned photography of architecture can claim to have independent artistic value in Austria today. It is owed to her that the auteur photography of subjectively objective representation has gained recognition as an independent art form. Thanks to, and through, Margherita Spiluttini, we have learnt in the past 25 years that there is an independent photographic reality of architecture. Timm Starl wrote about this: ‘The result is pictures that do reflect the ambitions and achievements of the architects, but in which the viewer can also recognize the subtle, yet pronounced hand of a photo artist. This is what makes the art of architectural photography, that the authors of the “given subject” and its representation are equally identifiable.’ This aptly characterizes the documentary and subjective visual language of Margherita, and Christiane Zintzen adds: ‘Without irritation, friction, or tension – no matter whether an unfamiliar viewer will later be able to see it in the picture –, no photo happens, or is created, with Margherita Spiluttini.’ And there also is the legendary conversation that French architect and theoretician Marcel Meili had with Margherita Spiluttini and the architectural photographer Heinrich Helfenstein for the architectural theory magazine daidalos in 1997. The Swiss Helfenstein, known to rigidly compose his pictures, was utterly bewildered by her proclamation of what Margherita herself called her ‘haphazard’ style of photography. Meaning that she takes the weather as it comes, that she includes circumstantial surroundings. That she lets her own reminiscences, sentiments, and emotions make themselves felt in the act of photographing. She is tempted by situations, productively takes on disturbances and inconsistencies, makes a narration of it, a story that results from the architect’s intentions, the place, the time-dependent momentary situation, and her personal, even intimate reaction to it. This is what I call the subjective factor in the documentary photography of Margherita Spiluttini. Being able to consciously admit to it bears evidence of her emancipative strength. She succeeded, with difficulty and with an effort, to liberate herself by means of her photography. With this book, I think, the time has come for Margherita Spiluttini to start taking time out from the everyday hustle and bustle of commissioned work and to sort out her ‘archive of architecture’, grown over 25 years, by criteria of artistic achievement. Her guiding ‘spatial themes’ are documented here for the first time. (Dietmar Steiner)
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