On November 21, at the OPOS space, which has been committed for years to promoting young talent in the fields of design, photography, art, and architecture, an exhibition was inaugurated that was of particular interest to anyone interested in the architecture of the new generations.
Entitled “Implied Volumes,” the exhibition presented the work of Pauhof, an Austrian group formed by young architects Wolfgang Pauzenberger and Michael Hofstatter, who work mainly in Vienna and Linz.
The exhibition, considered the culmination of previous exhibitions in Germany, France, Spain, Belgium, and Austria, presented projects created for competitions and otherwise, from 1986 to the documentation of Casa P. near Linz, recently completed and previously unpublished.
Pauhof’s work, characterized by strong conceptual and formal coherence and an expressive power close to the language of the modern avant-garde of the early 20th century, attracted considerable attention from critics during those years.
Known primarily for the theoretical contribution of their large-scale projects, such as the museum district, the government district on the Spreebogen in Berlin, urban planning in Vienna North, and the Austrian pavilion at the Seville Expo, they demonstrated with Casa P. their ability to transpose into reality and into the reduced volumes of a two-family house a spatial concept consistent with the assumptions of their large-scale experiments. In fact, this project also features the distinctive elements of their work: a taste for structurally extreme solutions, a subtle and unpretentious decomposition into elementary volumes assembled with rigid orthogonality, the spatial involvement of “emptiness,” and formal abstraction.
The steel models were certainly fascinating, true architectural objects that, thanks to their quality of execution and expressiveness, took on the dignity of independent projects.