Architecture and Ongoing Discontents

Radio Palladio1 is back. With a new programme: TOP C (the elevation of the “C” of HTC) – a focus on architectural criticism. In the winter term of 2021/2022, the show will be dedicated to the instrumentalization of architecture in Austria and Germany in relation to a critical past. “National Socialism lives on!” Theodor Adorno postulated in 1959 in a radio feature entitled “Was heißt Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?” (What does it mean to come to terms with the past?)2 Adorno urgently pled for the memory of the Holocaust to be preserved, because its destruction would be a betrayal of the victims of the Nazi crimes, who in this way would be deprived even of their memory. The word “Erinnerungskultur” (culture of remembrance) is originally related to an emphasis on the perspective of the victims, which Adorno thus demanded and introduced.3 From the beginning, spaces, places, architectures and monuments have played a central and sometimes fatal role in this context: as instruments, as expressions, as media to promote memories of a completely different kind. Under the guise of dealing carefully with the past, efforts are increasing – especially in Germany, but also in Austria – to use architecture in order to reconstruct a seemingly unsullied past by harking back to a time before the Nazis. On the one hand, this has led to the recent emergence of a peculiarly pulpy mainstream architecture that seems to come from a neorational, neoclassical set of building blocks, allowing for interpretations ranging from “modern” to “fascistoid”. The significance of buildings such as the new Weimar Bauhaus Museum by Heike Hanada, the Marbach

14.00–18.00

Angelika Schnell Antje Lehn

9 HTC

HISTORY THEORY CRITICISM

Museum of Modern Literature by David Chipperfield, or the awardwinning competition entry by Marte. Marte for Hitler’s birthplace in Braunau, which was about “neutralising the site”, is difficult to grasp. On the other hand, flagship projects like the Berlin Humboldt Forum, driven by identity politics, are completely out of touch: questionable in terms of architectural theory, aesthetically repulsive and politically implausible. An architecture that, as Bénédicte Savoye has pointed out, communicates to the outside that history can be undone, whereas the ethnological collection presented inside is defended by arguing that history cannot be undone. Radio features by the students will dive into this controversial and difficult situation: they will be critical, investigative, concrete, precise, and always focused on the architecture in question. The studio is accompanied by a workshop on radio making, as well as literature lists and lectures.

1 The first edition of Radio Palladio was a BArch5 HTC design studio at the Institute for Art and Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, taught by Angelika Schnell and Eva Sommeregger in fall/ winter 2014/15. 2 Adorno, Theodor W. (1971): “Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit.” In: Adorno, Theodor W.: Erziehung zur Mündigkeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 1028. 3 Assmann, Aleida (2013): Das neue Unbehagen an der Erinnerungskultur. Eine Intervention. München: C.H. Beck, p. 189.