Ortner & Ortner

Incorporating tradition doesn’t mean turning back the clock, but infusing a common identity with new dynamism. This is the message the Austrian architectural firm Ortner & Ortner seeks to convey with its buildings. They see European culture as an exemplary situation, in which old and new combine to create a particularly rich and multifaceted mix.

With Vienna’s museum district, Zurich’s Schiffbau arts complex, and the Dresden Public Library, this book focuses on three internationally significant contemporary cultural buildings. These are supplemented by some twenty additional building projects from the categories of theater, museum, and library, all of which – beginning with the early pavilion buildings from the Haus-Rucker-Co era (1967–1992) – take up the subject of "architecture for European culture." A large text section with essays by Bart Lootsma, Ernst Hubeli, and Sophie Lovell attempts to get to the bottom of this special mix of European architectures and rounds off the book as a whole.

Laurids Ortner was born in Linz in 1941. In 1967 he co-founded the architects and artists group Haus-Rucker-Co in Vienna (which disbanded in 1992). Since 1987 he has been a professor of architecture at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts).

Manfred Ortner was born in Linz in 1943 and joined Haus-Rucker-Co in 1971. Since 1994 he has been a professor of design in the Architecture Department at the Fachhochschule Potsdam (University of Applied Sciences, Potsdam).

Together they founded the architectural firm Ortner Architekten Düsseldorf in 1987. Since 1990 the firm has also had offices in Vienna and Linz (Ortner & Ortner Baukunst Ges.m.b.H.) and since 1994 in Berlin (Ortner & Ortner).