Die Neue Stadt /
The New City
Essay by Peter Noever for „Realisierte Visionen (Realised Visions)“, Klaus Bollinger, Institute of Architecture, University for Applied Art, Vienna, 2021
The new city.
Cloud Iron / Wolkenbügel. I dream about it at night. I then imagine a huge horizontal sculpture, in the spirit of El Lissitzky. A floating beam above the city I am familiar with. An unfamiliar sight: threatening, unadulterated, falsified, radical. Visionaries, masterminds may now have actually conquered the city. For a moment. I have the impression that the New York High Line is opening up in front of me. At a run on the old railroad tracks, the elevated park with miles and miles of lush, dense urban greenery with shrubs, meter-high bushes, trees and wild grass. Past Renzo Piano's new Whitney Museum, further down the Meatpacking District, past the Chelsea Galleries Mary Boone, Zwirner, Pace - the world's hubs for art trading between 18th and 29th Street, Pier 64 in Chelsea and the Hudson River in view. Completely surprised, I caught sight of an oncoming runner in a magic jogging outfit, raising her hand, smiling at me with her space helmet and making with her fingers wrapped in poison-green polyamide running gloves the "Victory" sign: Yes,of course, that was Liz Diller! She and Ricardo Scofidio are the actual creators of this urban planning feat. Then I suddenly realize that I've obviously been walking in the wrong direction: back. Finally, I see the new city in front of me. It lies below me, literally hanging under the Cloud Iron / Wolkenbügel on which I am moving on. What a feeling, what a view. Above us the clouds, the sky. Not far from Günther Domenig's bold T-Mobile building hovering over the city freeway, his Z-Bank in Favoritenstraße, proudly presenting itself in its new splendor; at the time one of the rarest cosmopolitan areas of this city. I see the Karlskirche, next to it, a Cloud Iron that stretches across the entire square to far beyond Adolf Krischanitz's Kunsthalle, where the new TU is housed, with completely new configurations, ideal for "action teaching," i.e., also with space for the imaginable. The museum by the esteemed Viennese architect Oswald Haerdtl had to be rebuilt after it was robbed of its original expressions, with a multi-story penthouse and was thus destroyed, to make way for the new TU building. The nearby new "Paris-Moscow" station situated at the maglev line for high-speed trains, which was built on the site of the former ÖBB Hauptbahnhof (main station), which has now been demolished, because it turned out that this station only fulfilled the requirements of a conventional train stop. "Paris-Moscow", a new landmark, a new place of encounter, communication and information – an impressive, forward-looking piece of architecture, a landmark visible from afar, a symbol of this city and its new spirit. While I was gliding through the city, full of curiosity and joyful devotion, a plethora of structures, buildings, and built experiments far away from the current "extremism of the mediocracy“ is beating down on me. I recognize only a few, but they appear clear and unmistakable. In full density. Fantastic! Lebbeus Woods' Aero-Livinglab, Le Corbusier's Chandigarh, Balkrishna Doshi's Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology, Ahmedabad, the Milan's Torre Velasca by BBPR and Stefano Boeri's Bosco Verticale, COOP Himmelb(l)au’s Musée des Confluences, Lyon, Torres de Satélite by Barragån and Goeritz, Thom Maynes Cooper Union Academic Building, New York, Zaha Hadids Fire Station, Weil/Rhine, the Private Residences by Ryue Nishizawa, Tokyo, and in particular Syd Mead's urban scenarios. Almost like a dream: architecture by architects who dared to experiment with the longing to penetrate into another world, to develop it further, to realize it selectively. Captivated by these impressive images, I only gradually recognize a figure that emerges from these fields of force, from this world of manifestos of ideas. He stands before me: Klaus. And there Prouvé and Nervi spontaneously come to mind. I think it was precisely these pioneers of architecture who gave him the support to dare to do things that are on the border of the calculable and which our society does not want to have. Before he gets a chance to speak, I let him know loudly that without him, many things could never have happened, that it was Klaus Bollinger who often made the dreams of the avant-garde come reality. "Do you remember Munich?" And I remember - unexcited,sovereign and beaming with joy stood the avant-garde structural engineer Bollinger next to Architect Prix. Both were hardly able to contain their joy and happiness at the success of this masterpiece. Was it a hallucination? A dream? - It seems so. With extreme reluctance, I finally wake up. Munich? Yes, of course, October 2007. Unique. Outstandingly impressive, the tens of thousands of square meters, almost floating roof cloud, for an automobile manufacturer.
(Original text in German)
