ART LIBRARY
Vienna, 1st District
1983
TEXTPHOTOSPLANS

The rooms on the second floor of the baroque Liechtenstein winter palace, built by Domenico Martinelli in the Vienna inner city, were adapted as state-rooms in the second rococo period by the Frenchman P. H. Devigny 1836-1847 and achieved great fame, in part owing to the mechanical devices and curiosities installed there.

The newly-planned installations are intended for the accommodation, storage and partial presentation of works by artists living in Austria which have been purchased by the Federal Ministry of Education and the Arts. It is planned to open the rooms as a semi-public storage gallery.

In order to optimize the planned functions, such as maximum hanging space, adequate viewing distance, lighting, hanging flexibility, suitability for disassembly, etc., the development of the design concept avoided accommodating the architecture to the very dominant existing interior and created a room-in-room situation with an independent, object-like attitude, which relates to certain existing axes and incorporates individual existing design elements in an abstract form. A new totality is thus created with the help of the integrated lighting concept, despite the very different visual formulation, which clearly accentuates the storage installations. The hanging surfaces, on the one hand stationary, on the other hand constructed as extendible movable, are built as lattice walls and enable great flexibility in hanging combined with light and transparent construction.