Wiener Blut, Viennese Blood, runs in many colors, from crimson to pale chalk. It reappears in decadent moments throughout the history of the city, washing from one bank of the Danube to the other. It’s not only Johann Strauss’ operetta that spark the rolling of the Danube metropolis’ blissful waltz. In the year 2050, radical young groups of architects joined together to recreate the city. Anywhere a historical reference can possibly be borrowed, they begin to copy like crazy. The transmission tower of Prague is dislocated to Vienna. The rest is facelifting, cut for cut. Explicit Architecture take stock, stroke by stroke. The result is a Veduta that has nothing in common with its gentle 18th century ancestors. This urban panorama documents a place in defiance of world cultural heritage, where towers shoot out of the ground like angry weeds, urban neighborhoods run rampant, where belief in progress collides with archaic wildness.

Forty years earlier. Vienna 2010, Hernals district, near the Brunnen Market.

Explicit Architecture Office. Drafting day and night, the architects in any and every state and mood. “Not a day without a line,” wrote Paul Klee. Lukas Göbl and Oliver Ulrich remind each other about the future. Take measurements and

conquer an 8-meter-long cross-section draft. Structures are generated as if on their own, several million lines breed and reproduce.

The production circumstances for architecture, design and art are subject to constant transformation, deviation and reinvention; today, paradigm shifts take place quickly and often seamlessly, media are updated, conditions invented and just as quickly discarded. Here, Explicit Architecture is seeking quite intentionally to provoke a reassessment of recent years and the ardent desires of a society expressing itself spatially in the most diverse of circumstances.

The City of Beautiful Bodies Vol. III is a city of phantasms. Its only existence is a drawing. So far.

2007

2009

Lukasa Göbl