Riegler Riewe. The Depth of the Surface

Published on the occasion of the solo-exhibition of the same name, this most recent publication on the work of the acclaimed Austrian-German architecture practice Riegler Riewe offers an inside view into the spatial imagination of its principals. The book features 16 seminal projects in two radically different, but visually complementary ways: The first part of the book consists of full-page illustrations representing architectural space by way of an enchanting visual estrangement—the void space of each project is left unprinted, while the solid stuff of architecture is printed in a subtle shade of purple-beige that incidentally is the only color of the book. As the surface of the paper surrounding the ground plans is printed in the same color as well, the projects appear like archeaological excavations carved out of the ground. This visual estrangement invites the reader to discover the work of Riegler Riewe in a new light, foregrounding space as structure while obscuring its function. Due to this conscious manipulation we start to imagine what we don’t know, evoking all kinds of programs which might occur in these ambiguous spatial structures. For those keen to get to know the real functions accomodated by these projects, the second part of the book provides a detailed and beautifully drawn documentation—this time representing the projects as customary line-drawings shown to scale and accompanied with precise captions indexing the spatial program. A critical essay by Andreas Ruby in between the book’s two parts introduces the reader to the architectural implications of Riegler Riewe’s original conceptual approach.