Martin Kaltwasser, Folke Köbberling :
Alice in Wonderland

Two escalators on a small grassy hill in Leobendorf are situated next to a campus with two buildings housing a primary school, a day care center, a music school, and a continuing education school. While one escalator goes up the small hill and the other down, they aren’t actually moving. Normally, escalators serve as speedy transportation for large groups of people in shopping malls or subway stations. These two escalators, on the other hand, can be used by people to walk up or down, as stages or starting points for creating stories or doing role play, theater performances or imagining life in the big city – or they can simply be used for climbing. They complement the form of the hill, while they also join it with the adjacent buildings. These two escalators may seem like alien intruders from the big city, and they were unfortunately met with little understanding and even rejection by some campus users. The two strange, seemingly useless objects were in fact so unbearable to some that they were eventually "embellished" with gaudily colored ornaments meant to revive the campus’s original "playground" feel. Although most people in this idyllic village living in their single-family homes with a fenced-in lawn regularly commute to the big city of Vienna for work or leisure, they did not want the big city – in the form of "dysfunctional" escalators – to disturb the town’s idyllic rural atmosphere. In their eyes, it’s better to keep Modernism, functionalism, lack of ornamentation and fast mass transportation in the city, where it belongs.
(Hildegund Amanshauser)