Werner Reiterer :
Gebäudeuntergrabung

In the project for the Lower Austrian Vocational School in St. Pölten the focus of art is the foundation of architecture. Through the act of uncovering something the onlooker is able to enter into a new spatial relation to the building and to adopt a new perspective towards architecture. In response to a specific place, linguistic forms are used that are supposed to create different conditions of reception. For Werner Reiterer it is another opportunity to refer to one of the visible, object-like forms of our life realm. By partially uncovering foundations and creating the possibility of experiencing them aesthetically and physically (by subverting them), he also reveals the perfectionist standardized appearance of architecture. The recourse made to codes of the building creates both theory-related and experience-oriented connotations. The artistic parameters expanded to include life as a context demands a radically new idiom that is created from the given situation. Instead of invention against the backdrop of usual, really aesthetic givens, there is intervention. Precisely given its minimal nature in relation to the whole volume of the building it is able to reverse conceptual and perceptual valences. The artistic segment destabilizes architecture in its categorical definition and now perhaps allows it to be grasped also as a whole sculptural structure.
(Werner Fenz)