Biographical readings of a work are always tricky, and this applies even more to architects than it does to writers or composers.

After all, buildings usually emerge from a strongly externally determined creative process.

In the case of Günther Domenig, things are a little different.

Born in Klagenfurt, he always saw himself as an artist-architect and approached his building projects with a great deal of stubbornness, which demanded a certain amount of tolerance from the client.

In Steindorf am Ossiacher See, in his Carinthian homeland, there is a Domenig in an almost pure sculptural form: he built the stone house on his family's property with his own financial means, according to his own ideas.

In 26 years of planning and construction, an internally and externally jagged building made of concrete, steel, sheet metal and glass emerged.

Matthew Alexander

Deputy head of department in the features section.

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There was a time when this piece of absolute architecture was retouched from aerial photos of the lakefront because it was considered disruptive to tourist promotions.

That has changed, and the tourism potential of this internationally acclaimed building has long been recognized.

Ten years after Domenig's death, the state of Carinthia is now devoting a whole series of exhibitions and events to the architect entitled "Dimensional", which will continue into the autumn.

The core of the appreciation is a comprehensive exhibition in the Carinthian Museum of Modern Art in Klagenfurt.

There, with the help of models, drawings and photographs, it becomes clear that one could write an architectural history of the second half of the 20th century using the example of Günther Domenig's work alone.

Probably no other architect outside of Austria tried out all the relevant styles in the years after 1960, both in design and in practice: brutalism, structuralism, organic architecture, deconstructivism.

There is just one thing that is not to be found in Domenig's work: that variety of postmodernism that has ostentatiously worked with historical stylistic quotations.

There are no columns, friezes or capitals with him.

Speer by Speer's architecture

Domenig was always avant-garde, which is why he is not accused of being fashionable, despite his stylistic versatility.

The fact that the Carinthian, who was born in 1934, always looked ahead had to do with his parents: both were ardent National Socialists who tried to raise their two sons accordingly.

The father, a judge, was shot dead by Italian partisans while on a foreign mission in 1944.

Domenig later said that he avoided right angles and symmetry, both of which in his view represented the Nazis' false concept of order.

In his late work, he even attempted to deal directly with the hated building heritage with the documentation center on the Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg.

The northern end of the unfinished congress hall is pierced by a wedge of steel and glass that can be walked on – Domenig once described his design as a spear through Speer's architecture.

The subtle was never his thing, at least not in his architecture.

Domenig was a contradictory personality, which becomes clear in the assessments of companions who have their say in the Klagenfurt exhibition.

Outwardly, the handsome sports car lover appeared to some like a playboy, but at the same time he was a serious, complicated person, vulnerable and hurtful.

He was a charismatic with at best a broken sense of mission;

able to work in a team as an architect, but only temporarily, which led to frequently changing project partnerships.

His comments on his own work oscillate between poetic verbiage and crude imagery (“ass” he called part of the stone house).

It's no wonder that he gave up his position as a university lecturer at Graz University of Technology prematurely because he felt cramped in the academic world.