Walter Pichler

b 1936 in Deutschnofen, South Tyrol (A). Studied at the School of Applied Arts in Vienna (A). Lives in St. Martin/Burgland and Vienna. Since the 1960s he works in the border zone between sculpture and architecture, specializing in architectural designs for utopian city-planning projects and three-dimensional models confronting space and individual perception. In 1967, he presented the «Prototypes», a.o.the «TV Helmet (Tragbares Wohnzimmer)» (1967), pneumatic sculpture «Großer Raum» (Large Space), symbolically charged paraphrases of furniture and apparatuses as body extensions. Together with Hans Hollein he demanded that architecture be free from the constraints of construction and that sculpture be free from the limits of abstraction. In a text dedicated to Pichler, Oswald Wiener had developed the phantasy of a cyborg as an apparatus which would free consciousness from its organic base, the body.

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