Raimund Abraham

One of our favorite architects, Raimund Abraham, passed away earlier this week. Thank you to Justin Fowler for sharing the below reflections on his life and work.

“All you need is a piece of paper, a pencil and the desire to make architecture.”

Austrian-turned New York architect Raimund Abraham recently passed away after his car collided with a Los Angeles city bus. He had just delivered a lecture at SCI-Arc entitled, “The Profanation of Solitude.” A disciple of John Hejduk at Cooper Union, Abraham was perhaps the most uncompromising figure in contemporary architecture, willing to argue for the critical sanctity of the discipline against all forms of corruption. His penchant for fedoras, cigars and sublimely apocalyptic drawings brought him insider acclaim, yet often put him at the margins of a field that has by now largely sought to abandon its critical mandate in favor of getting things built by whatever means necessary.

Abraham won his largest commission, the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York, by appealing directly to the Austrian parliament in 1996. As he later recounted in the New York Times, “The Austria that I respect and admire is the Austria of the early 20th century, the Austria of Wittgenstein, the Austria that built the most radical housing projects in the world. This is the Austria I celebrate with my building and with my symbolic, very personal protest.” In a similar act of protest, Abraham adopted a U.S. citizenship when Jörg Haider assumed power in Austria in 2000. Such a move, is of course, rare in a global culture of architectural production where many of today’s leading practitioners are more than willing to provide window-dressing for dubious regimes. In many respects, Abraham’s code of conduct was one of negation as a form of preservation, abandoning his country of birth in order to save the memory of its history and its potential; and resisting architecture’s current trajectory in order to retain the autonomy of the discipline.

Self-conscious legend, unapologetic combatant, and a supremely gifted visual craftsman, Abraham made his home within the void from which so many architects have tiptoed away.