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Johannes Spalt Elective Affinities 8 Foreword, Dietmar Steiner Album 14 It’s Lovely Here 24 In Principle 26 Roof. Screen. 30 Mobility. Lightness. 34 Poetry. Folly. 38 Elective Affinities 40 China, Japan, Turkey, Vernacular 50 Viennese Flair: Loos, Frank, Hoffmann 54 From Architecture to Furniture 62 Way of Living. Culture of Space. 64 Reisinger House, Gmunden, 1950–1952 70 Wittmann House, Etsdorf am Kamp, 1970 –1975 76 Salvatorkirche at Wienerfeld, 1975–1979 82 Maier House, Neupurkersdorf, 1980–1982 88 Raftlhof, Hessenberg, Altmünster, 1981–1984 94 Schubert House II, Kollmannsberg, Altmünster, 1983 98 Wander Bertoni Exhibition Pavilion, Winden am See, 1999 – 2000 102 Piplics House, Mödling, 1994–2005 Essays Monika Platzer 108 Johannes Spalt: Good Things Are Not Immediately Obvious Otto Kapfinger 140 Johannes Spalt: West-East Art of Space Wilfried Wang 172 Viewed from a Distance: On the Work of Johannes Spalt Appendix 190 Biography 192 Buildings and Projects 194 Bibliography 199 Index Foreword This book is dedicated to Johannes Spalt, his 90th birthday and his work. While this occasion clearly provided a reason for making it, this book it could also be viewed as an absolute necessity, because his work is so exceptionally uncontemporary. Today, at the end of the first decade of the new milennium, the world of architecture is shaped by a hectic, global zeitgeist. The boom of the star architects, who so strongly influenced the final decades of the last century, seems to be slowly abating, partly due to the fact that the formal spectacles offered have become meaningless, as today almost everyone can produce them in a visually overwhelming way. Nonetheless, we still find ourselves in an all-embracing economy of attention that, in a media cosmos bereft of values, unceasingly supplies the market with new, trivial styling ideas. Given this mass media background it has become difficult to talk again about an ‘architecture’, that ‘builds’ and ‘designs’ with cultural roots and with concepts and approaches developed from within the discipline. Since at least two generations of architectural history, that is since the end of the 1980s, a radical separation of architecture from everything that connects it with the real life of human beings and their needs, or links it to the experience gained from earlier buildings, has become evident. In his contributionWilfried Wang addresses this present-day Vanity Fair which no longer has any respect for the vast riches of the history of building. And when Otto Kapfinger in his contribution classifies Johannes Spalt as a proponent of modernism’s ‘Third generation’ we today are forced to recognise that this generation was apparently followed by a cultural rupture in tradition that left most of the current production of architecture detached from its roots, drifting aimlessly without awareness and devoid of any meaning. Today, just like before the boom of the vain spectacles, architecture that concerns itself with cultural roots and deals with contemporary concepts and approaches is again to be found off the beaten track where it offers resistance to the mainstream. Small, unspectacular works that once again investigate local qualities are to be found from Chile to China, from Norway to South Africa, and have taken up the comprehensive spirit of modernism – as if it were our experimental kind of antiquity. We must remind ourselves today that modernism did not drop from the skies, that it was not born without predecessors out of the usefulness of novel technical possibilities, but that, like every development in the history of culture, it resulted from surmounting and applying the prevailing possibilities in response to new needs. This necessary reflection opens up an approach to the work of Johannes Spalt that, in all its breadth and depth, should serve us as an example. In this context a question occurs to me that Spalt himself might once have asked: What is needed to set oneself up in the world? ‘What is needed’ refers to Spalt’s approach that is based on reflecting about what is truly essential and sustainable: the lightweight, the constructive, the demountable, the umbrella, the skin. All-in-all essential requirements with which the purpose of every architecture, every building element can be questioned and every kind of furniture thought out anew. The research area required is provided by the final term in the hypothetical question, the ‘world’. Investigating the wealth of experience contained in folk culture and its everday life was something that the third generation of modernism, and Spalt in particular, took almost for granted. What they wanted was not a modernist continuation of the consumer-based lifestyle in what is known as the ‘first world’ but a search for and the ensuing astonishment about the values and knowledge that had developed and been acquired in other old cultures. Can we really work out a contemporary architecture without understanding the rich cultures of Ottoman and Asian traditions? Here Spalt connects his own work with, above all, Josef Frank’s undogmatic and enthusiastic modernism. Which brings us to the term in the middle of our hypothetical question: ‘to set oneself up’. To repeat the question: What is needed to set oneself up in the world? Surely the main task of architecture – and the only essential one – is to create a ‘place’ that forms a suitable, harmonious, stimulating framework and background for the individual, the group, the masses? An architecture that, so to speak, ‘sets up’ or ‘furnishes’ us with an answer to the questions who am I and where am I. This is all to be found in this marvellously un-contemporary book that circles around the ‘Spalt cosmos’ in the analytical and enlightening contributions by Monika Platzer, Otto Kapfinger and Wilfried Wang, illustrated in the new and wonderfully unique photo-essays of Spalt’s domestic worlds made by Verena von Gagern. Monika Platzer’s editorial concept and her archival research in the Spalt papers provided the framework for the brilliant graphic design by Gabriele Lenz. Why did I feel so marvellously relaxed and contented after reading this book? Had I, perhaps, encountered real life? And had this encounter taken place in an architecture book – today?! (Dietmar Steiner)
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