Friedrich Achleitner 1930-2019: Writer,architecture journalist, and historiographer of Austrian modernism

摘要

On 27 March, 2019 the architecture researcher, architect and author Friedrich Achleitner died in Vienna at the age of 88. His influential literary work and his great services for the architectural history of Austrian modernism have been widely praised in the daily media and on our website. Here we wish to recall also the pioneering achievements of our former joint editor as an architecture journalist and a teacher. And his important activities in the area of the politics of architecture.In 1953 having completed his studies under Clemens Holzmeister at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna Friedrich Achleitner began to practice as a freelance architect. Together with Johann Georg Gsteu, with whom he had earlier attended the Gewerbeschule until 1950, he rebuilt the war-damaged neo-Romanesque Rosen-kranzkirche (Holy Rosary Church] in Vienna Meidling in a minimalist manner as "The Lord's Garage". It was to remain his only built work, a short time later Achleitner devoted himself to literature, a field in which, also employing a minimalist method, he set new standards: in his work words did not only describe certain contents but through their sound and structure became building blocks for an abstract text construction. With dialect, newly interpreted in an avant-garde way, he implemented this in pioneering fashion with his friends in the "Wiener Gruppe" (Artmann, Bayer, Riihm, Wiener). Through writing Achleitner soon found his way back to architecture. From 1961 to 1972 he worked as architecture critic for the Viennese newspapers "Abendzeitung" and "Die Presse", a short time later he began his project of the century: the guide"OEsterreichische Architektur im 20. Jahr-hundert (Austrian Architecture in the 20th Century), which appeared in five volumes between 1980-2010 in Residenz Verlag. The initiative for this incomplete project (it was no longer possible to publish the last volume about Lower Austria) came from the effort to continue the great humanist tradition of Austrian modernism that had been interrupted by National Socialism. By making extensive site visits Achleitner compiled information on thousands of relevant buildings and documented them with images, plans, texts and data (the amount always appropriate to the building's importance) in two volumes about the Austrian federal states and three that focus on Vienna. But Achleitner was also an academic teacher and between 1963 and 1983 he taught history of architecture at Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts and from 1983 until his retirement in 1998 as Professor for the History and Theory of Architecture at the Hochschule (today University) of Applied Art in Vienna. In this position he shaped the image of classic modernism for several generations of architects and art teachers. We should recall also the "architecture politician" Achleitner: from 1983 to 1989 he served on Austria's first architecture advisory commission, which town councillor Johannes Voggenhuber initiated in Salzburg. And at the start of the 1990s Achleitner supported with all his energy the founding of the Architekturzentrum Wien. In the mid-1990s he advised the new owner Springer Verlag as a member of the editorial advisory board to lead our magazine into the digital era.