Heinz Tesar’s architecture is associated with holistic ideas, and is 'value-conservative' in this sense. But at the same time, this architecture relates to its time, is modern, frank and open to consensus in a subjective dialectic between connection and isolation. However, this holistic concept is not concerned with hierarchical orders, but with relative weighting in a denomination process. Tesar is someone who names things, a 'baptist' who makes his objects that have acquired form individual and thus unmistakeable. For Tesar, the linguistic approach to architectural ideas is a pictorial event, and the draughtsman’s sketch a further 'linguistic' step towards articulation. Language operates first and foremost in images. The original, primal concepts are to be found in his early painting, in which he addressed homotypical proto-forms, a kind of subjective expansion of the archetypal formal world (embryonic form phases, soft monuments, fossils etc.), in other words followed the birth-process of forms, with denomination playing a major part on the one hand, whereas on the other hand we see the effect on the plane of painting or drawing of the proto-form, the sense of shape, the crystallization of something in thought. Here concepts like finding and fixing in the field of tension between individual and type is important, and so are the levels of subjective and collective experience and the way they are processed. Heinz Tesar works, to put it differently again, from a fictitious, almost ritualized dialogue situation, in which the levels for coming closer to a building idea can be accessed – in terms of drawing and of building itself. Whatever concepts Tesar might fix in this context, one thing is clear: it is a dialogue situation, a process of gradual articulation between convention and questioning, it is about connections and at the same time the isolation that Tesar expresses when listing his work. Friedrich Achleitner, born in 1930, studied architecture at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna. After early work as a practising architect he became a writer in 1958. As a member of the 'Wiener Gruppe' he wrote dialect poems, montage texts, and concrete poems. In 1961 he began his career as a highly regarded observer of contemporary architecture, finally as professor of the history and theory of architecture at the Hochschule für angewandte Kunst in Vienna. His main work as an architectural historian is Österreichische Architektur im 20. Jahrhundert, published in three volumes between 1980 and 1985.weiterlesen