Matthias Moroder: At the beginning of June 2024 your first individual exhibition in Vienna, entitled Ungefähre Hauptrichtung (Approximate Line of Action) in the jfk3 - Contemporary Art Space came to an end.A What did that show mean to you?

Hermann Czech: My first individual show in Vienna, yes. What can I say? I saw it, of course, as something positive (laughs).

Moroder: I have rarely seen such great crowds at a first night of an exhibition.

Czech: But in media terms in fact it was a flop. Only one newspaper carried a representative article. And then there was something in Falter; nothing in Profil or Die Zeit; nothing on TV. 

Moroder: But lots of important international architects, among others, did show up on the opening night...

Czech: Yes, and many even came in the run. The exhibition was really always well visited and was hardly ever empty. I was happy with how the curators did the show. While the resonance came mainly from the architectural trade, it was also very broad and international. It also found favour with younger people.

Moroder: Can you say something to the exhibition concept and also to working together with the curators Claudia Cavallar, Gabriele Kaiser, Eva Kuß and Fiona Liewehr?

Czech: The build-up was very congenial, starting from the distribution of the projects over the very different rooms on both floors, which was not always based on the use but also on the ideas behind the designs; think of Konrad Wachsmann’s methodology and the extension thereof to perception effects up to the inclusion of participation. Only later the work splitted up: Gabi Kaiser concentrated on reviewing texts and writing new ones; Eva Kuß designed the relaxed, wall-covering layout; Claudia Cavallar cared for the construction of the exhibition; and Fiona Liewehr for the organisational management. Gerhard Flora worked out the special staircase built in he exhibition. Not all projects were shown; some 10-15% ended up being excluded more or less by chance.

Moroder: Have you also rejected design projects in your career?

Czech: Do you mean, where I would have been comissioned? A commission does not come about in the first place when the viewpoints do not match. I have hardly rejected a commission for ideological reasons. Once I received a request to remodel a gallery that sold mass art. This I rejected because that was a swindle pure and simple. Selling something as art that is not worth anything. The seller knows it is not worth anything but represents things differently. It is misinformation and tastelessness, simply a wrong mental state on both sides, supply and demand. I don’t remember any other example of a content-based difference of opinion.

Moroder: There are two city maps in the exhibition, of the first district and the general area of the city, locating all your projects in the city.B These make it clear that, on the one hand, the first Vienna district occupies a central position in your output, and, on the other, just how much you have worked on Vienna as a city in general.

Czech: On the one hand, the concrete minor commissions came through my circle of friends in Viennese culture, on the other hand my planning interests were very much centred on Vienna. But the maps show just how much work misses the mark: a good third of it, and that is not just me in particular but the profession as such; you can call it “frustration tolerance”. Out of one dozen planning approaches, only two have had any kind of effect – and even then only indirectly.

Moroder: Which ones were those?

Czech: Both have to do with the Viennese underground network: around 1966, I belonged to the critics demanding continuation of the U3-West along Mariahilfer Strasse instead of Burggasse. And in 1983, my design and that of Wilhelm Holzbauer, proved that the Otto Wagner Bridge over the river Vienna could remain fully operative despite a new proposed route location. The competition had earmarked its destruction or, at best, its preservation as a detached monument, with the routing of the line going over a new bridge further to the east and more down-river. The Holzbauer design was built; it differed to mine by imitating the new connecting route constructions in an Otto Wagner style. The discussion of and solution to this issue, by the way, brought to an end the period of disdain for Wagner’s metropolitan railway designs on the part of the Viennese planning officials.

Moroder: What made you decide to essentially work alone? In the 1960s and early 1970s, it was pretty common in Vienna to work in a team.

Czech: The “visionary” teams did come from another background than arbeitsgruppe 4 or the estimation of team work initiated by Wachsmann. Inspired by the latter, I did begin working on the Restaurant Ballhaus with Wolfgang Mistelbauer and Reinald Nohal in 1961. I also did a boutique with Mistelbauer and Klaus Bolterauer in the 1960s.C It was not included in the exhibition (searches for a file, then opens the design). There is the interior and the shop front of the boutique. It was pretty cool at the time. It had a rail installed, on which spotlights for the exposed goods were mounted. Having experienced Wachsmann’s seminars we were convinced of the sensibility of teamwork but this did not mean the commercial “foundation” of a team with its own branding.

Moroder: At the secretarial office for the exhibition one could find your writings Zur Abwechslung (For a Change) and Ungefähre Hauptrichtung (Approximate Line of Action); the latter title was even used for the exhibition…

Czech: Each of them is a title of an essay in the respective book. Approximate Line of Action was a contribution to a Marcel Meili and Markus Peter monography, in which it says at the beginning: “A lot of what I see and understand there, I would have wanted to have done the same way; some of what I have done differently, I now recognise as a detour” which is why “I try to build, out of my own motivations, a conceptual grid to cross selected works of Meili and Peter.”1 This in fact is also structuring the exhibition: to follow trains of thought.

Moroder: You have written from the very beginning. How did it come that, besides designing, writing about architecture was to be so central to you? Do you see a correlation between designing and writing? 

Czech: I have always wanted to bring together design and language, meaning both analysing form through language and translating things formulated in language to form. There is a quotation from Mistelbauer: “…that there was, additionally, something like visual artistic thinking; a way of thinking in non-verbal connections, an inner ‘logic’ of forms, of space. That can, of course, also be described verbally, but that would be a translation into a foreign language.”2 I mean, he’s not wrong about the idea that there is a block between the verbal and form. But there are also relationships. Let alone associations: when they are not considered at the design stage, then it can happen to one that something can look like something one had never even thought of, and someone then says; “Listen, that looks like this and that.” And you think to yourself: it does? I didn’t really want that (laughs).

Moroder: And how did you come to write architecture criticism in the early 1960s?

Czech: Friedrich Achleitner wrote regularly for Die Furche and then began writing for Die Presse, even using a pseudonym. My first published article was about Wagner’s Viennese Metropolitan Railway, which I wrote with Die Furche in mind, because there were not so many publication possibilities. I had Achleitner read the text first; he found it was good and recommended it to Die Furche. It appeared in 1963.3

Moroder: And that article led to you writing regularly for Die Furche? Were you able to choose the topics or were they, at the very least, suggested?

Czech: The reasons for writing and topics came entirely from myself.

Moroder: Achleitner wrote about the Ballhaus Restaurant in 1985 that Nohal, Mistelbauer und yourself had used processes from literature, collage and montage in the design…

Czech: Yes, he wrote that that there can be different levels to something. A thing can be said seriously and also meant that way, but it can also be meant ironically.4 Such levels also apply to form. Or that one imitates something. By the way, one can also be imitated. Yesterday I received a whole series of pictures of a canteen in the Funkhaus (Radio Building) in Vienna. I remember vaguely someone speaking to me about what I had done in the Radio Building. But I have never done anything in the Funkhaus. Some of it was literally copied, other things they hadn’t bothered to look closely enough.D Now they are dismantling the whole thing because the whole building is being cleared out. The question is, is it really by me? (laughs).

Moroder: That wouldn’t be the first time that has happened to you.

Czech: It has never been as literal as that.

Moroder: It is astounding that that has never been perceived. As the connection is obvious.

Czech: Perhaps a lot of people really did believe I did that. This is completely possible.

Moroder: How would you characterise a copy in architecture?

Czech: Like all human action, building essentially is based on experiences and the adoption of knowledge and solutions. The meaning of the term “tradition”, in other words. If one could not copy or imitate, one could not do stairs or doors. If someone copied the bar profile of the Wunder-Bar, I found that progressive and ok. Things get more complex when someone tries to co-opt a certain feeling or “atmosphere”, i.e., stylistic elements. Eclecticism however, i.e., the “adoption” of a style, can be a useful means in the design process; it can, for example, deliver associations that otherwise would not come about. But eclecticism cannot be the essential source of architectural quality.

Moroder: How do you find being copied?

Czech: One ends up being totally surprised that one can be copied. I could never have imagined it.

Moroder: There is an exciting parallel here to the Loos Bar in Trinity College Dublin,E built in 1984 by de Blacam & Meagher.

Czech: Yes, but that is clearly a quotation that is intended to be recognised as such. It is on the third floor, which is some venture. But they also made a real mistake: they placed a mirror over the entrance, which Loos himself, of course, did not. No way is the spatial illusion going to work on this side, as one has just come in there.

Moroder: But it also shows that a direct translation is not possible. Ignoring, for example, that the wood and marble surfaces are painted, the upper area with the mirrors simply is not in agreement with the lower bar area.

Czech: Basically, it is an inverted arrangement. But responding to the different spatial conditions is justifiable. I don’t know if I have ever told you: Hollein did a prominent remodeling and intervention at the Siemens headquarters in Munich. At the time he asked me if I did not want to build the Loos Bar into one of the Pavilions. But I found the whole thing witless because it would never be the Loos Bar, so what was the point?

Moroder: The Nagiller House by Adolf Krischanitz,F who at the time still worked with Otto Kapfinger, from 1982 also has a certain closeness to your architecture. It was completed shortly after your Villa Pflaum and House M. There is also now and again confusion that it could be by you.

Czech: Well, I don’t believe, that this was taken from me. I prefer to see it as working the same influences. He also connected to Loos and the period between the wars. We both have that from the same role models, so to speak.

Moroder: One does not find the same stylistic elements in his later work.

Czech: Krischanitz later did an about turn. In the late 1980s he designed the Traisenpavilion in St. Pölten,G an art space consisting of a large round building beside a high slab. In doing so, he completed a move towards abstraction, how can I put this, in the direction of “cool”, purely geometric objects.

Moroder: Around 1990 there seems to have been a shift in the architectural stylistic idiom of many protagonists of so-called “little architecture”, not just of Krischanitz. From then on, they appeared to be less historically oriented.

Czech: Such changes were less interesting to me than the contradictions of the preceding period: the 1970s and 1980s are characterised in Austria by a contraposition, one I like to compare to the counterpositions of Loos and Hoffmann. But in contrast to the year 1900, the positions were not equivalently respected by the public. The arbeitsgruppe 4 and Johann Georg Gsteu, Gunther Wawrik, Hans Puchhammer, Ottokar Uhl etc.: none of them ever came up to the media hypes around Hans Hollein, Günther Domenig, Raimund Abraham, and so on. In historical view, that continues to this day. Recently I gave a lecture in London where I compared precisely this Austrian post-war opposition to the opposition between Loos and Hoffmann. I showed eight or ten images from arbeitsgruppe 4,H particularly from Johannes Spalt and Friedrich Kurrent, also team work with Gsteu, and compared their position to that of the Smithsons in England, by way of presenting a critique and conclusion of modernism. Kenneth Frampton was at the lecture and afterwards told me he had never seen those arbeitsgruppe 4 images.

Moroder: Yes, from a Vienna point of view, that is unbelievable.

Czech: Their problem was that they did not speak English. In 1955 they were even at a CIAM conference. There is a photo in the arbeitsgruppe 4 book by the Architekturzentrum Wien, where they are sitting in the second row at the table, obviously without close exchange.

Moroder: Is Viennese post-modernism different to international post-modernism? How do you see the difference between the two?

Czech: In Austria, as early as 1900, there was a differentiated view of modernism. The post-modern criteria of Charles Jencks can be illustrated coherently with images of the works of Wagner, Loos, and Frank; I myself once did that.  

Post-modernism is seen and criticised in very narrow terms. Exemplary for post-modernism was a major exhibition in the V&A museum in London in 2011. The catalogue contains everything that was ever criticised about post-modernism, so all formal characteristics. But basically, the Smithsons belong to post-modernism, as does arbeitsgruppe 4. On the one hand, they have informed about modernism, documented this through research and by that bridged the information gap caused by National Socialism, and on the other, they have overcome dogmatic modernism.

Moroder: For over ten years now there has been a trend in architecture, for which the umbrella term is “neo-post-modern”. How does that differ to international post-modernism?

Czech: There is? I am not aware of the term. By “neo” one generally expects a longer distance. By “post-modern” I understand not so clearly expressed formal connections. In 1980 Paolo Portoghesi came up with the cool formulation “the end of prohibition”. So, it is an expansion of a kind. I find this bashing of post-modernism, for example on the part of deconstructivism, particularly ridiculous. If anything is a part of post-modernism, it is deconstructivism. Generally speaking, if we now have a different attitude to modernism than was possible in 1920, then is everything that happens today, or at least everything that is relevant, post-modern. But, of course, one can always find certain currents.

Moroder: From the 1950s to the 1980s there was a phase of critical recuperation of the contributions of Viennese modernity in diverse discipline, which perhaps culminated in Hollein’s exhibition Traum und Wirklichkeit (Dream and Reality) of 1985. It is also possible to classify your writings and architectural works in this phase. For example,  the Kleine Café is a new interpretation or translation of the Loos Bar.

Czech: I would call it an usage. I did not want to simply recapitulate the Loos Bar. Instead, I used certain elements thereof in a completely new situation, that of the Kleines Café. The exactness of the mirrored images, for example that the pairs of lamps were so arranged that they formed squares with their reflections – that goes further than Loos and was more inspired by Wachsmann. The modular view is also there in Loos, but to follow that further in other contexts requires experience of Wachsmann.

Moroder: Could you expand further on that, on to what extent Wachsmann is necessary here?

Czech: Later on in one of the mirrored openings toilet doors were inserted, so a real opening took the place of the reflected one.. It also had to be higher, so the lintel got arched instead of sagging. But now the lintel had to show four real lightbulbs! And no one notices that unless it is pointed out to them. Following the modular coordination into the virtual – and back again – appears to me to be a later abstraction. But perhaps Loos would have thought of that as well, as after all he did predict the game of chess in a cube.

Moroder: in the early 1980s Vienna was recognised in academic circles as the birthplace of modernism and post-modernism. Over the following decade, that view was, on the one hand, dismantled but, on the other, the achievements of Viennese modernity were made objects of tourism.

Czech: I described precisely that: “The tourist sees architecture when it is restored, and Beisl culture where the name is on the tin, so to speak. And the most informed tourist is the inhabitant himself.”5 The term “Beisl” is a pure tourist expression. It was never seriously used for a restaurant or café earlier. When one did use “Tschoch” or “Beisl” it was meant negatively, in a real disparaging way.

Moroder: Did the discovery of Viennese modern architecture for tourism purposes have an influence on your work?

Czech: If it did, then it was more in the direction of greater exactness, as far as the complexity of reconstructions such as the Loos Bar entrance or the Employment Exchange by Ernst Plischke was concerned, in order to avoid misunderstandings.

Moroder: So, no influence on your architectural designs?

Czech: If one takes a broader understanding of the tourist perception, as consumption of cultural industry in the meaning given by Adorno, it becomes obvious that to apply this strategy means to do without genuine communication and to manipulate the public. “To see the consumer as a means is to place him on a lower level.” But, could one also gain a critical design potential from the material used for that strategy? “Is it possible, even in such a context, to regard the receiver not as a mere means to something else, but as the addressee of truthfulness, be it even cynical?”6 Design as a process, as a chronological line of decisions, must not be thought of in terms of consumption but in terms of its production. It addresses the freedom of the user or observer.

Moroder: Researchers of your work have so far not taken into consideration your book designs. How do you design your books? It is interesting that, by way of example, you use the same layout for your books Zur Abwechslung (for the first edition in 1977 and the second in 1996) and for Ungefähre Hauptrichtung in 2021.

Czech: They are both collections of texts that, from case to case, differ in terms of topicality, theoretical content and commitment. Which explains the switching between two and three columns on a practically square page format. Only a few graphic artists can help with that. Most of them do not know how, over the last 200 years, one has worked with books. In other words, they cannot read (he gets a book and opens it at his article in a catalogue). As at the bottom, after the picture, the page is empty, that must mean the article has come to an end, mustn’t it? Yes. (Turns the page). But no, it goes on. But, now it surely ends… But no, (again) it goes on. So, let us look further (turns the page). Oh, this really was the end… One can read about that with Karl Kraus, how one page or one-and-a-half pages in advance one should see that an article is about to end. This is just one example, what today’s graphic artists do not know, as many other things.

Moroder: You mentioned Karl Kraus: there has been interesting research into his normal workday, his daily café visits and nocturnal writing… How is a normal working day for you?

Czech: Sometimes it’s similar to Kraus’s but I’m not so sure that is particularly interesting… (laughs). So, on some working nights, I leave the key in the door and Mr. Flora is on the telephone in the morning, telling me he can’t get in. Then I come in my dressing gown and open the door.

Moroder: But, like Kraus, you love the café culture. When one wants to see you, one can simply go to the Kleine Café and wait for you there.

Czech: That is by no means the norm and not a safe bet.

Moroder: What is your office structure like?

Czech: An individual office is always hierarchically structured, as the design decisions are made by the atelier directors. The atelier also bears the commercial responsibility; if one works there, one does not share losses. But all contribute to the design decisions; only the final decision is made centrally. A different structure is cooperation between several such ateliers, where decisions require a consensus, which is not always free of suffering. We have just finished a competition design of that kind.

Moroder: Has your way of working been changed by the computer?

Czech: Here I would like to quote two paragraphs from a 2013 article:

“My and the following generation did not learn to draw on the computer. (Fritz Kurrent, even a little older, says: what do you want from me, I am a 20th century architect.) In the most intense design moments, we are dependent to transmit to staff members what we mean, and are usually unable to understand the steps required, and in order to perceive the results, must ask that they stop zapping between scales.”7

But the same article says:

“In generating form, computer programmes can go beyond the respective spatial imagining; the designer may expand the area of experience with this resource, so that an enriched spatial awareness can be expected. Unfortunately, these expansions do not lead – as hoped for by some – to a new philosophy of space, but often, in contrast, to trivial ornamentation.”8

Moroder: The topic of conversion is frequently discussed right now and you developed an important position on that very early on, in the 1970s, based on Hollein’s “Alles ist Architetur” (Everything is Architecture) maxim, which you turned into “Alles ist Umbau”“ (Everything is Conversion). How do you see the current renovation debate?

Czech: When one now says, for ecological or climate protection reasons, one should possibly not build anew and use everything we already have, one could see that as an emergency solution or as an austerity measure. I have recently begun to point out, against the background of my transformation concepts, that, on the contrary, it has always meant cultural impoverishment to unnecessarily remove something that exists. That conversion is not something inferior but can result in a fully valid work, Adolf Loos has introduced to modernism. But we can find it as far back as Palladio and even in early history. For architecture it is a win/win situation, if there is further reason to allow something to remain, as it represents, at any rate, an additional level of information, of reception. Even if it was regarded as inferior in the past, it can still be characteristic.