Graz, Austria
Mission Title: Post-Cultural Capital Blues
Mission Date: --
SCRIPT
- Visit the city of Graz and check out what contemporary architecture still means for people who live there, five years after the Capital of Culture 2003 celebrations.
- Visit Kunsthaus and Acconci's islands. Explore their facilities and vicinities. Interview people and ask them about their own personal geography in the city, before and after 2003.
- Visit Uhrturm and ask passers
- by about its 2003 shadow
- clone, and its impact on the people. Did they really like it or not?
- Speak with Siegfried Nagl, current mayor of the city of Graz, to understand in what extent has architecture helped the city to re
- build its brand. Ask him about the way this kind of celebrations affect a city's economy. Is the new identity affecting the old one? Are former industrial cities pushed too fast into a new cultural based economy?
TRAVEL BAG
Can architecture be imposed?
Maybe one woulnd't tell, but culture has a rather physical connection with a city. And when Europe's got an eye on you, you want to look good. Graz was renowned for having one of the most preserved city centers in Europe – it is a World Cultural Heritage Site since 1999 – but, after it was chosen as the sole European Capital of Culture in 2003, its face has acquired some quite new traits. As many other “second cities” in Europe have experienced an architecture-driven gentrification and have transformed through multi-millionaire cultural investments, so Graz' very own landmarks have experienced some - at times spectacular - changes.
Some of the architectural features that changed the city's appearance in 2003 were transitory, others weren't. The life-size reproduction of the Uhrturm clock tower by Markus Wilfling, sitting right next to the original on the Schloßberg hill, completely altered the perception of Graz' most distinctive landmark for a year, while the alienish Kunsthaus museum and artist Vito Acconci's islands - connecting the two sides of the Mur and hosting an open-air theater, a bar and a children playground - are still there. The new structures have a futuristic, transparent, shiny look, strongly contrasting with the town's folkloric buildings. While a fresh kick to an architectural landscape might just help, redesigning spaces also affects relations in both an economic and political way, whose amount can only be defined with time.
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