VRC Exhibition | The Passage to the New: Modern Architecture in Central Europe, 1890-1983, Photographs by Christopher Long

Sept. 17, 2009 to Jan. 15, 2010, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Location: Sutton Hall
Karl-Marx-Hof, Christopher Long - Architect Karl Ehn, Vienna, Austria, 1926-1930

During the mid 1980s, Christopher Long,  professor for Architectural History at The University of Texas at Austin, photographed the built environment in Central and Eastern Europe. Awarded a Fulbright to study at the University of Vienna, Long researched his dissertation on the life and work of architect and designer Josef Frank.

Long, trained as a cultural history, began a self-taught crash course in architectural history. He walked the streets of Vienna, Hungary and Poland. He visited and observed every Frank building and photographed other examples of Viennese modernism, including buildings by Otto Wagner, Josef Hoffman, Joseph Maria Olbrich, and Adolf Loos. He photographed during the cold winter months when light was clearest in order to overcome Austria's overcast weather and to capture building facades often veiled in the shadows of their neighbors.

From 1994-1996, Professor Long lived and taught in Prague. He shot images of a city in transition being rebuilt after the fall of communism. 

The Visual Resources Collection (VRC) collaborated with Artstor, a digital library of over one million images licensed by The University of Texas Libraries, to catalog and digitize over two hundred of Professor Long's slides. The exhibit represents a selection of images from Artstor's Christopher Long: Central European Architecture collection.