Friday, 11 June 2010, the MAK, Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art, is joining forces with the studio Prix, Institute of Architecture, at the University of Applied Arts Vienna to stage an architecture conference in honor of one of the most visionary and progressive architects and theoretical thinkers of the international avant-garde, Raimund Abraham. To honor and provide a discursive look at Abraham’s exceptional stance, the architects Peter Eisenman, Eric Owen Moss, Wolf D. Prix, Michael Rotondi, Lebbeus Woods and others will be joining together for the Vienna Architecture Conference at the MAK. Raimund Abraham stood for radicalism and utopias; he fought for visions and demanded the realization of architecture in its most unconventional and pioneering dimension. His legacy represents a point of departure and a challenge for contemporary architecture. ‘In the Absence of Raimund Abraham’ is devoted to pointing out the unshakable contemporaneity and unique imagination of the architect, visionary, theoretician, mentor and teacher Abraham in an international context. Just a few hours before his death on 4 March 2010, the architect—who was born in Austria and had lived in the USA since 1964—held a lecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in Los Angeles. In this talk, entitled Profanation of Solitude, he summed up his uncompromising attitude towards architecture. As a nonconformist and a fundamental critic and champion of a fundamental architectural stance, Abraham campaigned tirelessly for architecture’s collective renewal. With the construction of the Austrian Cultural Forum Building in New York (2002), he made an outstanding contribution to contemporary architecture in Manhattan. The well-known architecture critic of the New York Times, Herbert Muschamp, referred to the structure as the most important piece of architecture since the Seagram Building by Mies van der Rohe and the Guggenheim Museum by Frank Lloyd Wright. Info: www.mak.at