Icarch Festival for Architecture Event

From August 1-31, hinterland gallery will be transformed into a space for architecture. The ICARCH Architecture Festival takes place for one whole month. Chicago-based architect Dan Iona Coma is travelling with his students to Vienna. It consists of three parts, which take place daily – an exhibition, lecture and discussion. It is open for everyone who is interested.

We invite you towards the first Festival of Feral Architecture… in the very city where the famous essay Ornament and Crime was born: Vienna.

We all know what Loos claimed: that the more civilized a society, the more ornament would disappear, tattoos would disappear, graffiti would disappear…

But we know this is not true, not even in Vienna… there are plenty of Tattoo Shops… yes, in the very civilized city that, in Loos’ view, was to eradicate the criminal tendencies of the so-called “primitives” and so on… and we didn’t yet even mention Hermann Nitsch, the blood thirsty Viennese avant-garde artist, with his endless blood orgies…

So we thought that if there is a lion within, as the images below seem to stay, why not express it, architecturally – What if we would have the courage, maybe even the audacity to show the beast within, through our buildings – What if we would “tattoo” architecturally some buildings in Loos’ Vienna, so maybe we would thus tell a truth now not even murmured…?

So, during the whole month of August we invite you to exhibit your work, on the theme of Criminal Skins - Tattooing Vienna, at Hinterland Gallery in Vienna… maybe the very name ’hinterland” is appropriate… that is, the distant, hidden… the one that is not up front.

In simple words this is the challenge: choose any building that you feel might benefit from a little bit of visceral truth, any, as a suggestion, of those bare, banal, dead apartment buildings in Vienna and tattoo it architecturally… incise it, deform it, cut into it, to reveal its hidden truth, its hinterside, after all…

As we said, we will exhibit all works received during the First Festival of Feral Architecture, to take place in Vienna, at Hinterland Gallery, between August 1st and August 31st.

If you have any questions, please contact us.

You can present your work in any way you want. Just send it digitally to info@icarch.us by August 15th, 2017.