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The House Next To The Smithy 16.05.2002 - 29.07.2002 Press Conference: Wednesday 15th May 2002, 11:00 A.M. Opening: Wednesday 15th May 2002, 7:00 P.M. The Art Of Not Being An Architect The renowned Austrian artist Walter Pichler has completed a building not intended for either his own or his sculptures’ use, a 56m2 one-room house for his cousin. The position of the free-standing building relates directly to the old forge of his uncle’s, the South Tyrolean blacksmith Eugen Pichler, situated directly on the road. The old smithy plays an essential role in Walter Pichler’s artistic biography, it belongs to his family and has been a listed building since 1996. As a historical monument it is under conservation order and has been appropriately restored. "The House Next To The Smithy is the result of memories, family relationships and a journey back in time, in a phrase: a rather sentimental undertaking." Walter Pichler The property lies on the north face of the narrow Eggental valley in South Tyrol. The House Next To The Smithy adopts the hermetic insularity of the valley as a theme; the building is impermeable from the outside with walls of porphyry, a red stone typical of the valley. Rocks formed on the river bed encircle the house and form its base. The tiny but nevertheless monolithic looking building is furnished with what is required in elementary accommodation (fold-away bed, table, chair, stove, basin) and serves as a retreat for the client. The interior contains a bright room, windowless and covered with a glass roof, which can serve as a living room or as a workspace. A hydraulically powered hatch leads outside and via steps to a second, dark room situated underneath the house. Pichler’s uncompromising design principles and the realisation using appropriate materials emphasises the house’s archaic appearance. At the same time the consistent stance to be seen in all of Pichler’s oeuvre is manifest here too in the highest standards of craftsmanship and technical precision. The Exhibition The exhibition provides the visitor with an insight into the spatial dimensions of the house concerned and the intrinsic quality of the design on the basis of drawings and photographs that analyse the geographic context and the thematic manifestation of the building in an almost 1:1 narrative interpretation. The exterior walls of a space in the "Alte Halle" of the Architekturzentrum Wien are dedicated to a full-scale reproduction of the house, allowing the existing but ’absent’ architecture to be understood. The accessible space within this "model" is filled with plans, drawings and photographs. Drawings outside this space, spanning a period of over two decades, show the artist’s intellectual and artistic stance. They illustrate a process of coming to terms with memory and his own personal history without resentment, documenting Walter Pichler’s return to his childhood home of Eggental. Thanks to the support of Hannes Pflaum, President of the Architekturzentrum Wien, the majority of the material on display in the exhibition "Walter Pichler. House Next To The Smithy" has been recently acquired for the Architekturzentrum Wien-Collection. This collection is dedicated to sufficient documentation of exceptional individual projects to show the process behind them, the conditions under which they were realised and their history. The project and its realisation is being presented for the first time at the Architekturzentrum Wien and, in artistic terms, sends a programmatic message: Artistic excellence in the field of architecture ought, in the Architekturzentrum Wien, to be seen as a yardstick by which a more general culture of building may be seen. The exhibition is a tribute to the influence on contemporary Austrian architecture that distinguishes Walter Pichler’s work. A catalogue is being published by Jung und Jung, Salzburg, to accompany the exhibition with texts in German by Peter Esterhazy and Dietmar Steiner. 88 pages, approx. 90 full-colour images, format 23.5cm x 28cm, paperback Euro 29.80 / ISBN 3-902144-33-5 Concept and Design: Walter Pichler Project Management and Curator: Monika Platzer Press and Information: Ulrike Kahr-Haele Supported: Geschäftsgruppe Stadtentwicklung und Verkehr, Stadt Wien Wien Kultur Kunst Bundeskanzleramt Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kultur Arch+Ing, W, NÖ, B Sponsors: UNIQA Versicherungen AG Zumtobel Staff Österreich Vertriebs-GmbH |
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Press page Current events Past events Dates: Walter Pichler. House Next to the Smithy Information: Ines Purtauf Tel.: +43 (1) 522 31 15 - 25 Fax: +43 (1) 522 31 17 Email: purtauf@azw.at |
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