Raimund Abraham built almost nothing. He was known for his drawings, and he seriously believed that architecture doesn't have to be built to exist. In 1992 he won the competition for the Austrian Cultural Forum building in New York, beating 225 other architects of Austrian origin, and he spent the next ten years on this tower.
While it was going up, people in Austria argued about what it cost. In 2000, when a conservative government came to power, Abraham took American citizenship in protest. The Austrian Forum opened on April 18, 2002, and its author was by then a US citizen.
The institute the forum grew out of was founded in 1942 by Austrian emigrants. Since 1963 it had worked in a townhouse on the same site in Midtown. The decision to build a new building came in 1992: the Iron Curtain had just fallen, Austria had started talking about national identity, and the government wanted a house by an architect with a world name. Construction began only in September 1998, six years after the competition, and finished in January 2002.
The plot is about seven and a half meters wide, and the tower rises 84 meters. Abraham moved the mandatory fire stair to the back, so the whole width of the plot went to rooms. The slanted south facade looks like an architect's gesture, but it was dictated by the legal restrictions of the site.
Kenneth Frampton sat on the jury that chose Abraham. He later called the forum the most significant building in Manhattan since the Seagram Building and the 1959 Guggenheim Museum.
