Visionary Architect Hannes Stiefel Is UB's 2009-10 McHale Fellow in Architecture

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Architect, designer and planner Hannes Stiefel of the Zurich-Vienna architectural practice Stiefel Kramer, will be the 2009-10 Magda Cordell McHale and John McHale Fellow in the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning.

He will present the 2009 McHale Lecture on Nov. 18 at 5:30 p.m. in 301 Crosby Hall on the UB South (Main Street) Campus. It will be free of charge and open to the public. A reception will follow.

The McHale Fellowship was endowed in 2000 by Magda Cordell McHale, a member of the UB architecture faculty from 1978 to 1999, to support design work that involves speculation on the impact of new technologies on architecture.

She and her husband John McHale were among the founders of the Independent Group, the British movement that grew out of a fascination with American mass culture and post-World War II technologies. Magda McHale was an author and artist who spent decades researching and writing about the long-range consequences of social, cultural and technological change on global societies, the same issues that concern Stiefel.

He studied architecture at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and the Southern California Institute of Architecture, and is a member of the Swiss Society of Engineers and Architects and a lecturer at the Institute of Architecture at Vienna's University of Applied Arts.

He has worked as an autonomous architect in Switzerland since the 1990s, and from 2002 to 2004 as a project and design architect for internationally known architects in Vienna.

Since 1998, however, Stiefel has collaborated with Austrian journalist and editor Thomas Kramer, and in 2003 they founded Stiefel Kramer, a practice interested in the kinds of exciting concepts for which the Independent Group became so well known.

The practice, which has offices in Vienna and Zurich, includes the design of buildings, urban projects, city planning and publications.

Since 1995, the principals have won several awards, most recently first purchase in the international competition for new exhibition buildings at Bergisel, Innsbruck, Austria, an historic battle site that features commemorative chapels, a museum and a ski jump installed there for the 1964 Winter Olympics that has since hosted numerous World Cups.

In 2000 they received the second prize in the prestigious competition to design the Kunsthaus (art museum) in Graz and recently were awarded first prize in the competition to design the Landhausplatz in Innsbruck, a large plaza surrounded by historic monuments and Tyrolian public buildings of different eras, which is often used as a performance space.

The Landhausplatz proposal was developed in collaboration with the architect/artist Christopher Gruener and construction of the project is imminent. It is part of an ambitious architectural program undertaken by the city of Innsbruck to have internationally renowned architects replan major public spaces.

In addition, with young architects and designers from India, Germany and the U.S., Stiefel Kramer was involved in a complex project funded by the Austrian Chancellory of Art to contemplate, explore and discover various aspects of and relationships between terrestrial and space architecture.

The outcome -- including interviews with such "guest muses" as astronauts, architects, artists, engineers, sociologists and psychologists -- was published in 2004 as "Transcripts of an Architectural Journey: Musings toward a new genre in (space) architecture."

Stiefel will spend his fall residency term teaching in the school's Graduate Program in Architecture, and his work will be exhibited in the James Dyett Gallery in Hayes Hall on the South Campus on dates to be announced. The gallery is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.