Translator’s Introduction

The Austrian Graphic Artist And Writer Max Peintner was born in 1937 in Hall, Tyrol. He studied engineering at the Technical University in Vienna and architecture at the Academy of Visual Arts. Although his education focused on the technical side of engineering and architecture, he ultimately established himself as a historian and critic of modern architecture, beginning in 1964 with a study of Otto Wagner, the visionary urban planner and architect who shaped the face of Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century. These reflections on the meanings and impacts of modern architectural practices eventually led Peintner to his characteristic artistic and critical concern: the transformation and degradation of the natural environment through human constructions. This set of interests emerged already in a book of drawings published in 1969, Sechs Beiträge zur Zukunft: Technik- und Zivilisationskritik unter dem Deckmantel der Utopie (Six Contributions to the Future: Technology and Civilization Critique under the Guise of Utopia). From here, Peintner produced a large corpus of iconic drawings, many in pencil, that reflect on how technology in general and architecture in particular have denaturalized both the natural world and the way we perceive it. Perhaps the most famous of these drawings is the 1970–71 dystopian work Die ungebrochene Anziehungskraft der Natur (The Unbroken Attraction of Nature), which pictures a soccer stadium that crowds have gathered in to watch, not a sports match but a small forest growing from the playing field. The image recently attracted mainstream global attention by way of the 2019 “Temporary Art Intervention” of Klaus Littmann, who created a full-size implementation of Peintner’s vision (with real trees) in the Wörthersee Stadium in Klagenfurt, Austria. The installation, intended as a commentary on the climate crisis, found broad resonance in the global press and was featured in over 250 news articles by the end of the two-month “intervention” in October 2019. Littmann’s installation and its popularity are a testament to the enduring relevance of Peintner’s works, which offer viewers jarring glimpses of beautiful nature that can no longer be sustained by the world as we know it. The ecological pessimism expressed in Die ungebrochene Anziehungskraft der Natur needed no significant revisions or updates to resonate with a wider popular audience in 2019: Littmann’s installation is a more or less exact replication of the world pictured in the drawing.