The Introduction of Nature in the Austrian Radicals Practice

Abstract

This chapter examines the use of nature in the visionary representations of the radicals in the period between the early 60s and the late 70s, and assigns to the first generation of the Austrian Radicals (Raimund Abraham, Hans Hollein and Walter Pichler) the primogeniture of photomontages in which nature and technology blend in an urban or suburban landscape. The Austrian position against the modernists will be described with the focus on a specific aspect, generally defined by radicals as functionalism that, as in their interpretation, considered architecture as a series of watertight compartments to meet user needs. Austrian Radicals’ disagreement with modernist reductionism is also illustrated at the city scale and linked to the zoning approach. However, it will be demonstrated that, searching for the natural landscape, interpreted as a non-corrupted place, the Viennese do not exclude the function’s existence. Rather, they view themselves as more open to the more “natural” neglected by Arbeitesgruppe 4, the functionalist architects group that represented the cultural domination in Austria of the technocratic vision of the Modern Movement. Along this path, Hans Hollein introduces his techno-landscape and Haus Rucker Co, the oases, architectures that constitute the main focus of this research.