Page - 104 - in Demolished Modified Endangered - Modelling Austrian Architecture Of The 20th Century

104 ÖSTERREICHISCHER PAVILLON WELTAUSSTELLUNG PARIS BY OSWALD HAERDTL Year 1937 Status Demolished Material Paper Cardboard Glue Scale 1:50 Model maker Barbara Gruber Oswald Haerdtl was an architect and was born 1899 in Vienna. He studied architecture at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna under the supervision of Oskar Strnad. From 1922 to 1930, Haerdtl was an assistant of Josef Hoffmann, a professor at the University of Applied Arts. Haerdtl himself was appointed professor at the University of Applied Arts in 1935. Additionally, he worked in Josef Hoffmann’s office until 1939.1 In 1936 Haerdtl won the competition that allowed him to design the Austrian pavilion at the 1937 world fair in Paris. The concept of the building was to have a mixture of different sized showrooms around a courtyard. The pavilion was entered through the main exhibition room, an oversized, scaled up display case with a 30m x 10m panorama of the Austrian Alps. A traditional Viennese coffee house was located next to the main entrance.2 The ground floor of the building was made on site out of concrete. The walls and roofs of the pavilion were made of wood. The prefabricated wooden elements were transported from Austria to France by train. The preliminary building works took only twenty days. The pavilion opened on June 1937 and was already demolished in November the same year.3 1 Architekturzentrum Wien (Ed.) (2016): Architektur in Österreich im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert. Zürich: Park Books. 406. 2 Stiller, Adolph (2000): Oswald Haerdtl, Architekt und Designer. Salzburg: Pustet. 231-232. 3 Stiller, Adolph (2000): Oswald Haerdtl, Architekt und Designer. Salzburg: Pustet. 98.