Dialogues in Time: New Graz Architecture.

By Peter Blundell Jones. Graz: Haus der Architektur. 1998. Austrian schillings 780; [pounds]35

Graz is the capital of Styria, the southernmost state of the federal republic of Austria, the bit over the Alps, just north of Slovenia and east of Italy. Perhaps it is fictive to suppose that its location at the confluence of German, Latin and Slavic cultures has given the place special richness but certainly, in architecture, Styria has been an astonishing fecund source of invention and ideas for at least two decades. Peter Blundell Jones has been the main explorer of the scene, and his book on the new Graz architecture is a most apposite and welcome analysis of a staggering creative episode.

Blundell Jones came to investigate the area as an extension of his studies of the German Organic school, that strain of Modernism ignored by canonical describers of twentieth-century architecture like Pevsner and Giedion; it was the kindly one which put people rather than industry first, the one which still has a most vigorous existence in the German speaking lands with continuous development from architects like Poelzig through Scharoun to Behnisch and his descendants. At first, Blundell Jones thought that he had in Graz found an extraordinary enclave of Organic architects vigorously building a new society beyond the mountains, the kind of place to which the Pied Piper had led the children of Hamlyn. But he quickly realized that the 'Grazer Schule' was a term that could mean no more than 'a celebration of energy' because of the variety of different good architectures emerging in the city. Certainly, there were many fine exponents of the Organic tradition, people like Michael Szyszkowitz and Karla Kowalski, Hermann Eisenkock, Manfred Wolff-Plottegg and Volker Giencke. But there were also minimalists like Florian Riegler and Roger Riewe, and people of great talent who are impossible to label like Konrad Frey, and Ernst Giselbrecht.

Blundell Jones makes clear that this is a regional but far from provincial phenomenon: most of the architects who have made their names in Graz spent time (and in some cases still teach) in Germany, Holland, America or London and their experiences have continually refreshed the local cultural climate with a great range of new ideas which are filtered in the purifying air of the Styrian hills.

Behind much of this astonishing outpouring of creativity has been the rather reticent (but wild) figure of Gunther Domenig, at first in partnership with Eilfried Huth, then with Hermann Eisenkock. He has been professor at the Graz Technical University since 1980, and taught many of the younger Styrian architects. Perhaps more important is Wolfdieter Dreibholz who has been head of the Regional Building and Planning Department since he as a young architect fiercely criticized the then moribund institution in 1978. He organized numerous competitions, which gave the young architects their chance, and to some extent reversed the diaspora of talent as people realized that they could at last get work at home. It was a quite extraordinary time when Styria produced perhaps the best housing in the world, but in 1991, the Styrian People's Party was defeated in the polls and the new minister of housing, a member of the extreme right wing Freedom Party, decided that 'housing is no playground for architects', even though they had produced some of the most ingenious, tender and economical dwellings in the world.

Under the new regime, housing has been given to those eternal friends of the right, the mass housing design-and-build contractors with, as Blundell Jones points out, the prospect of placelessness which the architectural achievements of the '80s had abolished. As he says, 'the major architects ... retain their offices in Graz but increasingly build elsewhere'. Dreibholz's ideas have been taken up by other Styrian administrations, particularly in the hospital service, so public investment in good architecture has not ceased, and fine things can be expected in a couple of years' time. In fact, according to Blundell Jones, Dreibholz concedes that 'with jobs showered upon them and endless competition chances the architects for a while had it rather easy. That they now have to struggle once again may in the long term be no bad thing'. We must all fervently hope that he is right, for what he created has astonished the world and vastly improved Styria.

Blundell Jones has recorded the work with love and rigour. He looks at it in the perspectives of history, geography and theory, and divides the architecture into functional sections devoted to private houses, cultural buildings and so on. He has been extremely well served by his publishers, the Haus der Architektur in Graz, the place which has generated so much discussion and architectural ferment in the city over the last few years. The book is on fine paper, excellently printed and designed, with good colour photographs, clear drawings and concise, readable texts. We are delighted that many of them appeared in first versions on these pages.

PETER DAVEY