Back and Forth Cost Estimates, Breastfeeding and Turnaround Strategies

The emerging generation of Austrian architects is facing a wide range of great challenges: actively helping to shape a shift in the building sector to create fairer working structures while broadening their own scope to manoeuvre proactively.

Young architects who are just building up their own practices find themselves in the midst of urgent issues — climate crisis, rising construction costs and higher rents, buildings as objects for speculation — and with limited room for manoeuvre. What form does architecture take on when architects consistently engage with social and environmental issues? What does this architecture of the future look like? How do young architects find worthwhile commissions? How do they initiate projects themselves? How can more equitable living spaces and working structures be designed in collaboration, and maintained together?

In the forefield of the exhibition, concerns of and positions held by young architects were collected in a series of interviews by and with those concerned, and then condensed further collectively in a series of workshops held throughout Austria. The exhibition provides a snapshot of a new generation, a generation characterised by tactical optimism despite multiple crises. An open mapping with a compilation of the issues and positions involved that invites expansion. A platform that shows approaches and strategies that provide opportunities for young architects.

With its burning issues, the exhibition ‘Back and Forth Cost Estimates, Breastfeeding and Turnaround Strategies’ sees itself as a temporary extension to the permanent collection on show in ‘Hot Questions — Cold Storage’, and offers points of contact for fellow campaigners and those who still want to get involved.

Curators: Ella Felber and Silvester Kreil in collaboration with Solveig Furu Almo, Anna Firak, Gunnar Grandel, Lukas Pankraz Mähr, Natascha Peinsipp, Theresa Reisenhofer and Felix Steinhoff