Architect: Walter Pichler

An Overwhelming Concern with Shelter! (1966)

An Overwhelming Concern with Shelter! (1966)

Gustav Metzger

The International Dialogue on Experimental Architecture (IDEA) was held at New Metropole Arts Centre in Folkestone, Kent, 10–11 June 1966. The symposium was organised by Archigram and included contributions from Hans Hollein, Joe Weber, Yona Friedman, Cedric Price, Arthur Quarmsby, Anthony G. William and Reyner Banham. The following text is… Read More

Walter Pichler: Mystery and Mysticism

Walter Pichler: Mystery and Mysticism

Harvey Herman

Walter Pichler’s sketches for the utopian city projects he developed with Hans Hollein in the early 1960s appear like arrangements of magnetised iron filings, blowing about the page to reveal mysterious momentary structures. Though they would later inform hardened isometric drawings, these forms are full of plasticity and, in this… Read More

Startha Éagsula: Steve Larkin Architects on Walter Pichler

Startha Éagsula: Steve Larkin Architects on Walter Pichler

Steve Larkin

This text has been excerpted from Startha Éagsula / Alternative Histories (2020), a companion catalogue to Alternative Histories (2019) and published to accompany the third installation of Alternative Histories at the Irish Architectural Archive. Startha Éagsula / Alternative Histories is now available to purchase from Drawing Matter’s bookshop, here. Friedrich… Read More

Alternative Histories: BeL on Walter Pichler

Alternative Histories: BeL on Walter Pichler

The selected drawing – a light-hearted but somewhat nervous sketch bearing the title Sketch for Underground City – belongs to an early body of work by Walter Pichler. Working on abstract, hypothetical cities and buildings, Pichler questions the relationship of oppositional systems: positive and negative space, the designed and found object, movement… Read More

Notes on the Sketchbook

Notes on the Sketchbook

Mark Dorrian

When we talk about the sketchbook what do we mean? Its complexity is reflected in the difficulty we experience – in many examples, at any rate – in straightforwardly attaching a name to it, for there are times it might seem to be equally a notebook, a journal, a diary,… Read More

This Was Tomorrow: Reinventing Architecture 1953–1978

This Was Tomorrow: Reinventing Architecture 1953–1978

This Was Tomorrow: Reinventing Architecture 1953–1978 is an exhibition about architectural imagination and the power, processes and poetics of creation and invention. It presents a series of twelve episodes – beginning in the 1950s – that look at the ferment of new ideas as architects began to reconceive space in response… Read More

A Brutal Matter (1962)

A Brutal Matter (1962)

Walter Pichler

Architecture … is a brutal matter … it crushes those who cannot stand it. – Walter Pichler. Quoted from a manuscript statement, c. 1962.

Walter Pichler: 20 Sketches from the Archives

Walter Pichler: 20 Sketches from the Archives

‘Architecture,’ said Walter Pichler, ‘is a brutal matter … It crushes those who cannot stand it.’ Between 1961 and 1963 the sculptor and designer, working in collaboration with the architect Hans Hollein and drawing on conversations with Raimund Abraham and Friedrich Achleitner, introduced a radically adventurous new plasticity to architecture,… Read More