The Brooding, Needlelike Form of the Austrian Cultural Forum Has Been Heroically Conceived and Intricately Detailed by Raimund Abraham

Architectural Record, August 2002

Twenty-four stories is not very high in Midtown Manhattan terms, but even the most preoccupied walker on East 52nd Street would be unlikely to miss the Austrian Cultural Forum, though it is dwarfed by far larger, bulkier neighbors. What first grabs attention is a five-story-high, sphynxlike form that juts toward the street. It projects out of suspended layers of sloping glass, which overlap each other sharp as knife edges. This needlelike tower, a mere 25 feet wide, draws the eye to its solid top, which is carved with mysterious, totemic slots. Most remarkably, the architect, Raimund Abraham, has stretched a mere 30,000 square feet over a dizzying 280-foot height.

In every respect The Austrian Cultural Forum seems to have been defined in out-of-the-ordinary terms. It is probably the most expensive building, per square-foot, erected by a foreign government in America, though it is not intended to project government power or even to spur new direct investment. “The Forum’s purpose is to make the dynamics of contemporary Austrian culture better known,” says Christoph Thun-Hoehenstein, the Forum’s director, “including the marvelous and very interesting things happening in the contemporary art world in various disciplines, such as visual arts, architecture, and music.” Thun-Hoehenstein is programming the Forum’s galleries, auditorium, seminar rooms and library to cross-fertilize arts talent in Austria, America, and internationally.

“Here is a truly exceptional client,” comments Kenneth Frampton, a Columbia University architecture professor who served on the competition jury that selected Abraham’s scheme. “It was audacious to the point of craziness to put this pencil-point skyscraper on a 25-foot-wide townhouse site. But the Austrians decided that the centrality of the placement in Manhattan was worth it. And they pushed it through.”

In the Austrian-born, 69-year-old Abraham, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs found an architect whose determination matched its ambition. Indeed, so impatient with the compromises inherent in construction is Abraham that he has completed only a handful of buildings in a career spanning almost 40 years. He has lived in America since 1964, but his substantial international reputation is based on teaching (at the Cooper Union, from which he has just retired, as well as numerous other schools) and on theoretical drawings and models of extraordinary power (“The last iconoclast,” below).

His approach to the Forum design was not theoretical, but, he says, “objective.” Abraham worked out the amount of space needed and stacked it volumetrically. He found it almost perfectly filled the zoning envelope, which slims as it goes up along a sloping plane so that sunlight may reach the street. The crucial decision, says Frampton, which almost alone caused the jury to select the scheme over 225 competitors, was to give up the daylight from the north elevation to place two fire stairs that scissor over and under each other. Most of the other schemes ran the exits along one of the party walls, but the arrangement so reduced the building width that the resulting floors were “very difficult” explained Frampton. “The problem with the site was its width, not its depth.”

Creating usable, if small floor plates freed Abraham to deploy daylight more theatrically. A large skylight lures the visitor out of the lobby, past the stainless-steel elevator enclosure and up a short stair to a mezzanine gallery space. Throughout, double height spaces and the modeling of the south elevation throw surprising stripes of light and unexpected shadows into the building.

While the stone, metal, and glass vocabulary of the exterior carries into the public spaces, a more domestic scale emerges the higher the floor, and the more private the program. The change is most obvious in the warm, tiny wood-paneled auditorium, which seats only about 75. Abraham compares the four-level director’s apartment at the top to a brownstone house, but this aerie–flooded with light from its sloped glass–offers from its lofty perch a far different experience than its earthbound brethren.

Abraham allowed the slope to trigger the evocative elevation strategy. The slits and overhangs in the façade denote where the program changes as the building rises (from public spaces, to offices, to the apartments at the top). As if defiant, the projecting rectangle of the eighth-floor director’s office breaks through the façade’s glassy membrane. The brooding totemic imagery in the projecting elements, the punched openings, and the central vertical slit give the façade its masklike, almost menacing quality. It’s not obviously inviting, and about that Abraham is unapolagetic: “It protects what is intimate within,” he says.

This metaphorical armament seems to be as much about Abraham as it is about architecture or the aspirations of the Forum. Resistance is a way of life for Abraham, according to colleagues, and it spills into his architectural approach. Materiality is his chosen medium because he envisions truth being derived from the very fabric of architecture. The diagonal braces behind the glass façade take the place of conventional lateral supports, which usually lie invisible behind opaque spandrels. Here their pistonlike quality expresses resistance to a metaphorical as well as literal compression emanating from the comparatively large bulk of the buildings on either side.

No decision went unconsidered. “In the kind of skin I envisioned, glass was not about transparency but about weight,” he explains. “I wanted to suspend glass and layer it. You perceive its platelike qualities and the knifelike edge.” Inside, glass-and metal office partitions, detailed using little I-beam shapes, elegantly display the door’s pivot hinge. Mechanical services are rigorously organized and encapsulated in painted metal chases. “Considering that he presents himself as the ultimate bohemian type–the artist, the provocateur, the poet–there are two aspects of Raimund that astonish,” says Frampton, “the impeccable working drawings and his capacity to work out every nut and bolt and carry it out to the nth degree.”

But Abraham’s design mystifies those who have grown to appreciate the sensual and the spectacular that characterizes so much contemporary work. Instead of rigor, they see an arid obsessiveness that harkens back to a dusty golden era of heroic Modernism.

Unexpected sensations unfold out of the Forum’s apparent severity, however. The sloped glass and the modeling of the front façade, with side-facing windows here and there, dramatically frames views of sidewalk life below and spectacular shaftlike vistas down Midtown’s street canyons. The visitor sees an entirely different cityscape from that offered by the standard, frontal, street-wall building. In its small floors, the Forum paid a price for going so dramatically vertical. But each level offers a different experience of the city outside the full-height windows. Lower floors look toward the neo-Gothic rose window of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, serendipitously visible through a jumble of water towers. Upper floors open to tower-dotted city panoramas.

Abraham has never hidden his disdain of architecture-as-usual–calling architects who work with developers “lackeys,” for example. And it has been easy to dismiss him as one who did not want to get his hands dirty with the inevitable compromises that clients and contractors entail. But the variety of experience and evocation Abraham packs into his sliver tower makes a powerful case for his passion, for his vision, and for his adept defense of the integrity of the work against compromise-minded politicians and builders. “After the process of construction is completed,” he told Kenneth Frampton in 1999, “there is no place for excuses or blame. That is the truth of built architecture.”

The Last Iconoclast
“If architecture doesn’t take risks, it remains just design,” said Raimund Abraham in a recent interview. He makes it clear that “just design” isn’t good enough, and that architecture that is without risk, challenge, and conflict is not worth doing. The exploratory drawings, sketches, and models he has long made evoke the Austrian Cultural Forum’s armored exterior imagery. “Raimund has always maintained that one doesn’t have to build to be an architect, that the drawing and the idea are as important as the built work,” says Kenneth Frampton.

Abraham describes a dialectic of materiality and ideal geometry. It is as if every line drawn on paper was pregnant with meaning, a tactic deployed in a never-ending battle between the intrinsic nature of substances–their material weaknesses and strengths–and the purity of primary form. “It’s a whole process of anticipation–anticipating that a line becomes an edge, that a plane becomes a wall,” says Abraham. “The texture of the graphite becomes the texture of the built.” He seems to operate in a mode of perpetual embattlement where rules are always questioned and molds must be broken. Asked why the Forum was not more inviting in appearance, he responded, “You have to overcome barriers to really appreciate something.” His design commands you to pay attention to it and try to decipher it.

Abraham’s sensibilities were profoundly formed by the Tyrolian environment in which he grew up, where “farmhouses were stone fortresses” that appeared to have grown out of the mountainous terrain. He skied and climbed mountains, becoming intimately aware of the geology. (“You had to know if that rock would hold when you put your weight on it.”) World War II brought bombs and skies filled with airplanes, which evoked in Abraham both horror and fascination with the esthetic power of such massive machine-borne destruction. “All of this,” he says, “is in the Forum building.”

Students are attracted to Abraham’s fierce integrity. He does not go easy on them, but, as one former student commented, he makes you want to go where he leads. Colleagues say he picks fights, holds grudges, and can’t work well with others, but they also describe a kind of closet idealist who can rarely see the silver lining amidst the dark clouds, and yet can’t stop struggling to achieve his dream.

Building the Forum certainly tested Abraham’s tenacity. After he won the design competition, in 1992, the project languished, as controversy erupted over its cost. (It ended up coming in at almost $1,000 per square foot.) Although the foreign minister and the culture minister supported the project unstintingly, Abraham found himself arguing for the project on the floor of parliament. Finally, construction was approved and began in 1998. Abraham fought with the contractor and subcontractors. New York’s corruption-ridden concrete firms couldn’t meet the specs, it is said. The curtainwall had to be fabricated in Austria because American makers couldn’t achieve the quality Abraham demanded, it is said. Abraham refused to give a building tour to a prominent Austrian official because he disagreed with the political direction of the country, it is said. Neither these nor numerous similar stories can be verified because of pending legal actions or fear of Abraham’s temper. Abraham does say, “I lost 10 years fighting for the building.”

“Raimund has enormous pride,” says Frampton. “He’s quite courageous and self-possessed and anarchic in a way. He’s a bit Don Quixotic because too many things become issues.” Out of this has come a building that Frampton describes as “heroic in conception, in a way that’s been absent in Manhattan over the last 40 years. The Forum is more akin to American building of the turn of the 20th century.”

Home Hot Topic Articles Books Consulting About JSR
	The Brooding, Needlelike Form of the Austrian Cultural Forum Has Been Heroically Conceived and Intricately Detailed by Raimund Abraham Architectural Record, August 2002 Twenty-four stories is not very high in Midtown Manhattan terms, but even the most preoccupied walker on East 52nd Street would be unlikely to miss the Austrian Cultural Forum, though it is dwarfed by far larger, bulkier neighbors. What first grabs attention is a five-story-high, sphynxlike form that juts toward the street. It projects out of suspended layers of sloping glass, which overlap each other sharp as knife edges. This needlelike tower, a mere 25 feet wide, draws the eye to its solid top, which is carved with mysterious, totemic slots. Most remarkably, the architect, Raimund Abraham, has stretched a mere 30,000 square feet over a dizzying 280-foot height. In every respect The Austrian Cultural Forum seems to have been defined in out-of-the-ordinary terms. It is probably the most expensive building, per square-foot, erected by a foreign government in America, though it is not intended to project government power or even to spur new direct investment. “The Forum’s purpose is to make the dynamics of contemporary Austrian culture better known,” says Christoph Thun-Hoehenstein, the Forum’s director, “including the marvelous and very interesting things happening in the contemporary art world in various disciplines, such as visual arts, architecture, and music.” Thun-Hoehenstein is programming the Forum’s galleries, auditorium, seminar rooms and library to cross-fertilize arts talent in Austria, America, and internationally. “Here is a truly exceptional client,” comments Kenneth Frampton, a Columbia University architecture professor who served on the competition jury that selected Abraham’s scheme. “It was audacious to the point of craziness to put this pencil-point skyscraper on a 25-foot-wide townhouse site. But the Austrians decided that the centrality of the placement in Manhattan was worth it. And they pushed it through.” In the Austrian-born, 69-year-old Abraham, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs found an architect whose determination matched its ambition. Indeed, so impatient with the compromises inherent in construction is Abraham that he has completed only a handful of buildings in a career spanning almost 40 years. He has lived in America since 1964, but his substantial international reputation is based on teaching (at the Cooper Union, from which he has just retired, as well as numerous other schools) and on theoretical drawings and models of extraordinary power (“The last iconoclast,” below). His approach to the Forum design was not theoretical, but, he says, “objective.” Abraham worked out the amount of space needed and stacked it volumetrically. He found it almost perfectly filled the zoning envelope, which slims as it goes up along a sloping plane so that sunlight may reach the street. The crucial decision, says Frampton, which almost alone caused the jury to select the scheme over 225 competitors, was to give up the daylight from the north elevation to place two fire stairs that scissor over and under each other. Most of the other schemes ran the exits along one of the party walls, but the arrangement so reduced the building width that the resulting floors were “very difficult” explained Frampton. “The problem with the site was its width, not its depth.” Creating usable, if small floor plates freed Abraham to deploy daylight more theatrically. A large skylight lures the visitor out of the lobby, past the stainless-steel elevator enclosure and up a short stair to a mezzanine gallery space. Throughout, double height spaces and the modeling of the south elevation throw surprising stripes of light and unexpected shadows into the building. While the stone, metal, and glass vocabulary of the exterior carries into the public spaces, a more domestic scale emerges the higher the floor, and the more private the program. The change is most obvious in the warm, tiny wood-paneled auditorium, which seats only about 75. Abraham compares the four-level director’s apartment at the top to a brownstone house, but this aerie–flooded with light from its sloped glass–offers from its lofty perch a far different experience than its earthbound brethren. Abraham allowed the slope to trigger the evocative elevation strategy. The slits and overhangs in the façade denote where the program changes as the building rises (from public spaces, to offices, to the apartments at the top). As if defiant, the projecting rectangle of the eighth-floor director’s office breaks through the façade’s glassy membrane. The brooding totemic imagery in the projecting elements, the punched openings, and the central vertical slit give the façade its masklike, almost menacing quality. It’s not obviously inviting, and about that Abraham is unapolagetic: “It protects what is intimate within,” he says. This metaphorical armament seems to be as much about Abraham as it is about architecture or the aspirations of the Forum. Resistance is a way of life for Abraham, according to colleagues, and it spills into his architectural approach. Materiality is his chosen medium because he envisions truth being derived from the very fabric of architecture. The diagonal braces behind the glass façade take the place of conventional lateral supports, which usually lie invisible behind opaque spandrels. Here their pistonlike quality expresses resistance to a metaphorical as well as literal compression emanating from the comparatively large bulk of the buildings on either side. No decision went unconsidered. “In the kind of skin I envisioned, glass was not about transparency but about weight,” he explains. “I wanted to suspend glass and layer it. You perceive its platelike qualities and the knifelike edge.” Inside, glass-and metal office partitions, detailed using little I-beam shapes, elegantly display the door’s pivot hinge. Mechanical services are rigorously organized and encapsulated in painted metal chases. “Considering that he presents himself as the ultimate bohemian type–the artist, the provocateur, the poet–there are two aspects of Raimund that astonish,” says Frampton, “the impeccable working drawings and his capacity to work out every nut and bolt and carry it out to the nth degree.” But Abraham’s design mystifies those who have grown to appreciate the sensual and the spectacular that characterizes so much contemporary work. Instead of rigor, they see an arid obsessiveness that harkens back to a dusty golden era of heroic Modernism. Unexpected sensations unfold out of the Forum’s apparent severity, however. The sloped glass and the modeling of the front façade, with side-facing windows here and there, dramatically frames views of sidewalk life below and spectacular shaftlike vistas down Midtown’s street canyons. The visitor sees an entirely different cityscape from that offered by the standard, frontal, street-wall building. In its small floors, the Forum paid a price for going so dramatically vertical. But each level offers a different experience of the city outside the full-height windows. Lower floors look toward the neo-Gothic rose window of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, serendipitously visible through a jumble of water towers. Upper floors open to tower-dotted city panoramas. Abraham has never hidden his disdain of architecture-as-usual–calling architects who work with developers “lackeys,” for example. And it has been easy to dismiss him as one who did not want to get his hands dirty with the inevitable compromises that clients and contractors entail. But the variety of experience and evocation Abraham packs into his sliver tower makes a powerful case for his passion, for his vision, and for his adept defense of the integrity of the work against compromise-minded politicians and builders. “After the process of construction is completed,” he told Kenneth Frampton in 1999, “there is no place for excuses or blame. That is the truth of built architecture.” The Last Iconoclast “If architecture doesn’t take risks, it remains just design,” said Raimund Abraham in a recent interview. He makes it clear that “just design” isn’t good enough, and that architecture that is without risk, challenge, and conflict is not worth doing. The exploratory drawings, sketches, and models he has long made evoke the Austrian Cultural Forum’s armored exterior imagery. “Raimund has always maintained that one doesn’t have to build to be an architect, that the drawing and the idea are as important as the built work,” says Kenneth Frampton. Abraham describes a dialectic of materiality and ideal geometry. It is as if every line drawn on paper was pregnant with meaning, a tactic deployed in a never-ending battle between the intrinsic nature of substances–their material weaknesses and strengths–and the purity of primary form. “It’s a whole process of anticipation–anticipating that a line becomes an edge, that a plane becomes a wall,” says Abraham. “The texture of the graphite becomes the texture of the built.” He seems to operate in a mode of perpetual embattlement where rules are always questioned and molds must be broken. Asked why the Forum was not more inviting in appearance, he responded, “You have to overcome barriers to really appreciate something.” His design commands you to pay attention to it and try to decipher it. Abraham’s sensibilities were profoundly formed by the Tyrolian environment in which he grew up, where “farmhouses were stone fortresses” that appeared to have grown out of the mountainous terrain. He skied and climbed mountains, becoming intimately aware of the geology. (“You had to know if that rock would hold when you put your weight on it.”) World War II brought bombs and skies filled with airplanes, which evoked in Abraham both horror and fascination with the esthetic power of such massive machine-borne destruction. “All of this,” he says, “is in the Forum building.” Students are attracted to Abraham’s fierce integrity. He does not go easy on them, but, as one former student commented, he makes you want to go where he leads. Colleagues say he picks fights, holds grudges, and can’t work well with others, but they also describe a kind of closet idealist who can rarely see the silver lining amidst the dark clouds, and yet can’t stop struggling to achieve his dream. Building the Forum certainly tested Abraham’s tenacity. After he won the design competition, in 1992, the project languished, as controversy erupted over its cost. (It ended up coming in at almost $1,000 per square foot.) Although the foreign minister and the culture minister supported the project unstintingly, Abraham found himself arguing for the project on the floor of parliament. Finally, construction was approved and began in 1998. Abraham fought with the contractor and subcontractors. New York’s corruption-ridden concrete firms couldn’t meet the specs, it is said. The curtainwall had to be fabricated in Austria because American makers couldn’t achieve the quality Abraham demanded, it is said. Abraham refused to give a building tour to a prominent Austrian official because he disagreed with the political direction of the country, it is said. Neither these nor numerous similar stories can be verified because of pending legal actions or fear of Abraham’s temper. Abraham does say, “I lost 10 years fighting for the building.” “Raimund has enormous pride,” says Frampton. “He’s quite courageous and self-possessed and anarchic in a way. He’s a bit Don Quixotic because too many things become issues.” Out of this has come a building that Frampton describes as “heroic in conception, in a way that’s been absent in Manhattan over the last 40 years. The Forum is more akin to American building of the turn of the 20th century.”
© copyright 2006 James S. Russell \| terms