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A. Aigner:
"The Vienna Werkbund estate on display. Building exhibition, outdoor museum, digital web-exhibit";
Talk: 2014 ASA (Austrian Studies Association) Conference on "1914: Preludes and Echoes", Session "Material culture, exhibition and display in Vienna", Austin, Texas (invited); 2014-02-06 - 2014-02-09.

Taking the case of the Vienna Werkbund Estate (VWE) an architectural icon of the so-called second Vienna Moderne is considered in its various dimensions of display. The paper addresses 1. the VWE as a building exhibition immediately after completion in 1932, 2. as an open air-museum for tourists after being listed as an official national monument in 1978, and finally as a subject represented on homepages after the anniversary exhibition in the Wien Museum commemorating the 80th birthday of the estate in 2012. The focus is on the cultural transformation of the estate in terms of meaning and value. Different 'lives´ of the estate closely linked to various dimensions of display and different practices of cultural representation are to be examined. The view is long term, from the past to the present. Beyond the narrow bounds of architectural history findings of an empirical study on a 'lived-in monument´, methodologically based on ethnographic fieldwork, are to be presented. The main argument states that the process of heritage-ization entails tensions and conflicts, veiled in the legitimizing representations of the powerful; that residents reproduce normalized representations but also creatively use the status of heritage for their own purposes.

material culture, architecture, exhbition, display, Bourdieu, sociology of architecture, Werkbundsiedlung, Vienna