After January 2026, the old Vienna University of Economics and Business campus as well as the former Biocenter on Althanstraße will have disappeared. A complex that has defined an entire district is today considered outdated, impractical, aesthetically obsolete. A utilitarian structure, after all, that deserves no tears. New educational institutions will emerge.

This photographic work does not oppose this development, but embraces the the status quo.

Here, infinite hours of labor have taken form to enable decades of knowledge transmission. The construction of such a complex was an enormous undertaking—planning, construction work, countless decisions that had to be made. For decades, this place served thousands of people: lectures were held, exams were passed, degrees were celebrated, encounters were made possible.

The fact that the campus is today considered unsuitable, obsolete, does not negate what took place here. My photographs are a deliberate attempt to give this place—which is generally dismissed as ugly and dysfunctional—a final, positive memory. In the warm autumn light, another side reveals itself: not one of failure, but of work accomplished, of function fulfilled, of decades of significance.

For my work, I waited for the low-standing sunlight. In those moments when its warmth falls through the glass façades and transforms empty lecture halls into stages of silence, the possibility reveals itself to see the outdated, impractical, and aesthetically obsolete utilitarian structure in a positive light.

One can sense the stories of people whose hands touched the handrails, whose faces were reflected in the rhythmically designed façade elements crafted with greatest care, whose conversations took place on the now-abandoned seating.

What is disappearing here is not merely concrete and glass.

It is a chapter of urban identity, a testament to a conception of education and community that manifested itself in space.

In this in-between state, between function and memory, between architecture and ruin, lies a peculiar poetry.

Photographs, as Susan Sontag* knew, lose their original emotional meaning and gain a new one through the mere fact of when they were taken.

*) „On Photography, In Plato’s Cave“, Susan Sontag (Penguin Classics, 1971/2008), page 21: […] most photographs do not keep their emotional charge. A photograph of 1900 that was affecting then because of its subject would, today, be more likely to move us because it is a photograph taken in 1900. The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past. Aesthetic distance seems built into the very experience of looking at photo-graphs, if not right away, then certainly with the passage of time. Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

What appears today as my romanticized view of a departing utilitarian structure may in the future move us precisely because these images document a specific threshold.

They show the moment before disappearance. They are a gesture of attention toward the overlooked.

Beauty, as my images show, is not a question of original intent. It emerges through patient observation, in the right light, in the awareness of transience.

This work captures what no one will miss—and for precisely that reason should be remembered, before the transformation is complete.