Raimund Abraham

The visionary architect and draughtsman Raimund Johann Abraham (1933–2010) was born in Lienz, in the Tyrol district of Austria. He graduated from the architecture program at the Technical University in Graz and established an avant-garde architectural practice in Vienna before moving to the United States in 1964. In this country he taught first at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence and, from 1971 until his death, at the Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture in New York City and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. In 2003, Abraham was a visiting professor at the Southern California Institute of Architecture.

Abraham’s best-known work is the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, which was completed in 2002 after years of disagreement about its radical solution to an awkward site. Measuring twenty-five feet wide and 280 feet tall, the building serves an organization founded in 1942 by Austrian emigrants for the purpose of preserving and disseminating Austrian culture. Critics described the building as “knife thin,” and Abraham himself compared its sharply angled facade to a falling guillotine. In a 2001 interview with his client he opined: “If I did not include the anticipation of terror in my architecture, it would not be worth anything.” [1]

As an architect working in Vienna and New York, Abraham was preoccupied with the environments his buildings had to relate to. “What is context in New York?? On one side of the Institute there is a horrible post-war skyscraper. On the other side there is a hotel, no less horrible from before the war. People love to call New York a collage. But a collage would imply some kind of plan. New York instead resembles much more an anarchic imponderability.” [2] Not unlike G.B. Piranesi, the great Italian architect who created fantastic visions in his etchings, Abraham used drawing as an outlet for his creative inventions. His densely detailed and dark renderings for such projects as “Houses Without Rooms” and “Seven Gates to Eden” gained him international recognition and inclusion in the Venice Biennial.

Although regarded by some as irascible, he was revered as a teacher. Seeing himself as a provocateur, he explained what teaching meant to him: “Teaching forces me to engage in a critical dialogue with somebody else, and find a level of objectivity that allows me to have a fair critical argument. My role as a teacher is simply to clarify, although that’s a bit simplistic. When I give a problem to the students, it’s my problem; I am trying to anticipate how I could solve that problem. And my joy is when the students come up with a solution I haven’t thought of.” [3]

Notes:

[1] Abraham, quoted in William Grimes, “Raimund Abraham, Architect with Vision, Dies at 76,” The New York Times, March 6, 2010.

[2] Abraham, quoted in Shohei Takasaki, Japan-based International Online Magazine Features Creative Culture, http://www.shift.jp.org/en/archives/2001/11/raimund_abraham.html.

[3] Abraham, quoted in Carlos Brillembourg, “Raimund Abraham,” BOMB, vol. 77 (Fall 2001), http://bombsite.com/issues/77/articles/2421.