Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
Krampus, a half-goat, half-daemon of centuries-old Bavarian-Alpine lore, appears prior to the celebration of the benevolent giver Saint Nicholas on December 6th, where Central European communities have a Krampuslauf, or Krampus Run, the night before.
Hans Hollein, artist, designer, theoretician and Pritzker Prize-winning architect from Vienna, who breathed postmodernist life into everything from buildings to furniture to tableware, died recently. Julie Iovine writes on this multi-dimensional creative force, particularly known for his museum design, including Vienna’s Haas House (1990) and Frankfurt’s Museum of Modern Art.
Austrian media artist Bartholomäus Traubeck has custom-built a record player that is able to “play” cross-sectional slices of tree trunks. The result is his art piece “Years,” an audio recording of tree rings being read by a computer and turned into music, much like a record player’s needle reads the grooves on an LP.
Tall buildings tend to use massive amounts of energy with big carbon footprints. One new Viennese project featured in Passive House Plus shows that high rise doesn’t have to mean high environmental impact.
The Seebühne, a floating opera stage of bewildering proportions rises every summer from Austria’s Lake Constance, the centerpiece of the annual Bregenzer Festspiele (Bregenz Festival). It has staged productions such as Verdi’s “Aida,” Giordano’s “André Chénier,” Bernstein’s “West Side Story,” and next year will be Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.”