(AU) Michael Hofstätter and Wolfgang Pauzenberger both teach architecture at the Vienna T.U., set up the Pauhof agency in 1986. The work of these two Viennese architects includes many different projects (submitted in particular to international competitions), exhibition design, installations, and one or two rare and masterful constructed works. The rigorous and radical architecture of Pauhof explores the paths of a critical minimalism and a basic abstraction, which are both quite close to conceptual art. With an approach that both strips down and intensifies the modernist vocabulary, Pauhof is in fact seeking a real formal independence of the architectural object. This object is released from all manner of stylistic, historical and contextual reference, and relieved of all manner of heteronomous determination, and as such is worked in a specific way and becomes just architecture. As a negative response to the excesses of Viennese postmodernism, this architectural self-reference is the very condition, for Pauhof, of a possible connection with the context, the city, and, above all, the subject summoned in its full power of perception.

Pauhof
Hofstätter (Michael) (1953), Pauzenberger (Wolfgang) (1955)
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• House S 2000