Hot Questions-Cold Storage

A new survey of the last 150 years of Austria’s architectural history.

The new permanent display of Architekturzentrum Wien’s (Az W) collection is a milestone in the presentation of architecture and its social dimensions. Hot Questions—Cold Storage is published alongside this comprehensive exhibition on Austrian architecture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, featuring color images of all exhibits, concise texts, and thematic essays.

This book reexamines the country’s architectural culture of the last 150 years, situating it in its cultural, social, and political contexts. Each chapter is prefaced by a question, asking, for example, about the impact of capitalism on our cities and villages or about the contribution architecture can make to our survival on the planet. These “Hot Questions” bring to life the “Cold Storage”—the silent repository of the collection’s holdings. This book offers a multi-perspective narrative that presents Austria’s building history with all the developments, ideologies, and institutions it comprises. The social relevance of objects and documents is revealed through questioning and visualization, in connecting research and the museum’s mission to collect.
 

Angelika Fitz is a cultural theorist and curator and has been director of the Architekturzentrum Wien since 2017. 

Monika Platzer is a curator and head of collections at Architekturzentrum Wien.

 Architekturzentrum Wien is Austria’s museum of architecture and has gained international renown as a public space for exhibiting, discussing, and researching the ways in which architecture and urban development influence and shape our everyday life.