Off the Wall and Out of the Box

Almost a century ago, Rudolph Schindler moved to Chicago, and then to Los Angeles, where he hybridized the Raumplan lessons of his Austrian mentor Adolf Loos with the break-the-box lessons of his American mentor Frank Lloyd Wright. On the hillsides of Los Angeles Schindler invented a hybrid vision of his own, building houses that were omni-directional in all x,y, and z dimensions. Joseph Giovannini, writing criticism in New York but practicing architecture in California, has written extensively on Schindler and has built on Schindler’s vision of space/form in his Los Angeles projects. In an homage to Schindler, he is returning to Vienna with an interpretation of space in his own work, inspired by Schindler and by other early Modernist architects and painters for whom space and form were inseparable. His lecture will emphasize the search for three-dimensional (and four-dimensional) space in the media in which architects design, from paper and physical models to the computer.

Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien, Lichthof 2