‘Blockhaus’, finally, is an almost terrifying monolith, an apotheosis of muscular brutalism, an overwhelming oppressive, ‘closed’ space which emphatically resists the verticality of church architecture (and its tendency to reach to the sky) and shuns the outside world except for the pockets of light that filter through the few openings. The ‘Wotruba Kirche’, by contrast, is in effect a constructivist building with protruding volumes and an eccentric sense of geometric austerity, which manifests itself in the almost freestyle synthesis of rectangular blocks. The rough weathered concrete of ‘Sculpture House’ paradoxically blends in perfectly with the surrounding forest and foliage, appearing as an organic growth fully integrated into the landscape with little differentiation between inside outside. Gillet worked together with the sculptor Félix Roulin (1931) and the engineer René Greisch (1929-2000) to fashion a highly unusual organic, asymmetrical structure which resembles a mass of rocks and blends into the surrounding forest, indeed almost seems to have grown out of it as a kind of "living-sculpture". Finally, the third building is the cavernous, grotto-like "Sculpture House", a private residence in Angleur (BE) designed by the Belgian architect Jacques Gillet (1931) between 1967-68 and constructed in sprayed concrete as a wild synthesis of architecture and nature, of structure, materials and form. The second, "Blockhaus", is the Church of Sainte Bernadette du Banlay in the town of Nevers (FR) built by Claude Parent (1923) and Paul Virilio (1932) between 1967-68, a formidably heavy bunker-shaped building made of beton brut with an imposing curvilinear interior.
The first of these is the Church of the Most Holy Trinity in Vienna-Mauer built by the Austrian modern artist Fritz Wotruba (1907-1975) between 1974-76 (also known as the Wotruba Kirche) an imposing, unmistakable building which looks like an enlarged piece of abstract sculpture, a kind of three-dimensional synthetic cubist arrangement which consists of 152 asymmetrically arranged vertical and horizontal concrete blocks, with the narrow spaces in between used as windows and doors. In line with her earlier works, here too Konrad does not seek out famous landmarks but turns her attention to peripheral, marginalized and overlooked architectures.Įntitled "Concrete & Samples" (I, II, & III) the work consists of three silent 16 mm colour films (and a forth one, still in the making) which each focus on a specific concrete building, two public, the other private.
From an interest in repetition, multiplicities and a rhizomatic form of representation, she now focuses on singularities and the most individualistic - even eccentric - aspects of modernist architecture from the 60s and the 70s. Rather than focusing on the urban sprawl and groupings of standardized, modernist typologies she now turns her attention to outlying, single, iconic, highly idiosyncratic buildings. (.) Konrad's most recent project is both consistent with her earlier investigations as well as a new point of departure.