To the death of Raimund Abraham

On Thursday, March 4, 2010, Austrian-American architect Raimund Abraham died in a traffic accident in Los Angeles.
Abraham was born in 1933 in East Tyrol, studied architecture in Graz, and worked for four years in Vienna. He permanently relocated to the USA in 1964, where he initially taught in Providence and from the 1970s in New York at Pratt Institute and later at Cooper Union. In German-speaking countries, Abraham gained fame with his 1966 book [Un]Built, more as a theorist than a practicing architect, but eventually he built a residential building on Friedrichstrasse as part of the Berlin IBA in the 1980s, and at the turn of the 1990s, he also constructed the Traviatagasse housing estate in Vienna. Among his most famous realizations is the Austrian Cultural Forum high-rise building (2002), which Kenneth Frampton described as “the most significant modern building constructed on Manhattan since the Seagram Building and the Guggenheim Museum of 1959”. In the same year that the cultural forum was completed, Abraham renounced his Austrian citizenship in protest against Jörg Haider's participation in the Austrian government.
His last lecture took place on March 3, 2010, at SCI-Arc and was titled The Profanation of Solitude (The Profanation of Solitude). The following day he died in the early hours in downtown Los Angeles in a traffic accident.

Anthony Vidler, Dean of Cooper Union, expressed his deep sorrow in the following statements. “A tremendous visionary, architect, and teacher whose strong bond to architecture influenced many generations of students and friends. His relentless search for authenticity and his sharp criticism of superficiality made us all better. He will be greatly missed.”

Eric Owen Moss, Director of SCI-Arc during today's memorial gathering, recalled Abraham's last lecture, which “solidified his unwavering love for architecture and his willingness to fight for discourse about design, just as he demonstrated. This unique and strong defense of architecture by Abraham is irreplaceable. We miss you deeply.”