Monuments of architecture and creators of the transcendence - Fritz Wotruba. "Wotruba Church"

(Images from Arch Daily.com)

The fusion between art, sculpture and architecture when set in place within those creative disciplines ensured by its intertwining engineering design, can achieve something very unique and enduring.  Fritz Wotruba, the acclaimed Austrian sculptor and artist who defined shapes into their basic forms, was commissioned in 1964 by Margarethe Ottillinger, who after World War Two, when Europe was divided by Russian and American interests and a Cold War between the Super Powers provided an uneasy spectra over the world.  Ottillinger was kidnapped by Soviet border guards in 1948 before Austria was unified, under the suspicion she was spying on the Russian sector and assisting defectors crossing over to the American side of Europe.  More importantly in her detainment by the Russian military at the time, she was suspected of being involved in clandestine aspects of the “Marshall Plan”, in which the Soviets rejected by viewing the American reconstruction blueprints as a way of swaying countries under their influence onto the American side.  An aspiring diplomat, she was sentenced to 25 years hard labor at a Soviet Gulag, Ottillinger was 29 at the time.  

After 7 years in a Russian labor camp she was released in 1955, suffering a near fatal illness whilst being incarcerated, she returned back to Austria of the same year.  The resourcefulness and industrial aspects of Ottillinger's determination shone through, despite what she endured, her willpower and resilience enabled her to learn fluent Russia, which in her rise to appointed positions in post war Austrian engineering and construction companies – Ottillinger became one of Austria's most important political and industrial figures.  In the early 1970s Ottillinger asked Fritz Wotruba, already renown for his sculpture work, to design a church that would sit upon a hill of a former Nazi military barrack, as a bold statement of reassigning faith, which had been lost due to the horrors of war.  An icon for people to admire and return too.  A beacon of defiance after the devastation and inhumanity in the wake of WW2.  He agreed and with the project Architect Fritz G. Mayr, Wotruba began his series of cubist inspired, geometric sketches of monolithic blocks to which Mayr used as the template for the architectural designs and in August of 1974 construction began on the cathedral.  

Wotruba passed away before the church could be finished as Mayr continued on with the project and in 1976 the building was completed.  Staying true to Wotruba's original sculptured concepts, the complexity and seemingly intangible symmetry of the design transcended away from any modernist concept, in particularly the emerging brutalist architecture of the 1960s and 70's.  There is a deep abstract reasoning to this structure rather than any Brutalist imprint, which is in tune with Wotruba's compressed monolithic shapes – his trademark style of molding and solidifying aspects of humanist design.  Giving the design of the Church a very distant and a somewhat paradoxical place of worship, an enigma of shapes, without what seems is a beginning and end.  In an illusiveness it appears, from afar, as though there is no obvious entrance into the cathedral, it therefor becomes multi facaded and mysterious, like the entity of nature and the obscurity of a God.  

A place where human beings may not find any answers, but only within its meditation.  The cathedral was posthumously named “Wotruba Church” after the famed sculptor, who wrote at the time of the its design “...Apparent chaos arises from the arrangement of asymmetric blocks should ultimately result in a harmonic unity”. 

Wotruba Church stands as a true testament to what is deemed Monuments of architecture and creators of the transcendence.