The Austrian-American architect Raimund Abraham was fatally injured in an accident in Los Angeles on 4 March 2010. Following a lecture at the Southern California Institute of Archi- tecture he collided with a bus.

Abrahams was born in 1933 in Lienz, Austria and, following his studies at the Technical University of Graz, he ranked among the exponents of the new Viennese architectural avant-garde. His work was recognised by a joint exhibition with Hans Hollein and Walter Pichler in 1967 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York among other things. In 1964 Abraham emigrated to the USA, where he continued to deal with the subject of architecture, above all theoretically and graphically, and lectured among others at the Cooper Union School of Architecture and at the Pratt Institute.

The number of his buildings that were actually realised is small; sometimes the last bit of luck was all that was lacking: in the competitions for the Centre Building shell, Musician's House, 2008 Pompidou and for the Opera de la Bastille in Paris he took second place in each case. He was able to implement some residential and office buildings in the USA and in Austria, as well as one in the context of the International Building Exhibition in 1987 in Berlin. Abraham gained international fame with the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York. The building, which is only 7.6 metres wide and barely 90 metres high, was praised by critics as one of the best in Manhattan, but was the cause of heated discussions as the building costs trebled due to the rising US dollar, building delays and high building requirements. On the minimal footprint Abraham arranged the public areas over several floors as one flowing room.

Abraham planned a second building in Germany as part of the Hombroich Museum Island, on the former military base near Neuss. Like the Cultural Forum, the realisation of this Musician's House is dragging on for decades and is characterised by financing problems and structural challenges. The design for the conical concrete building with its apparently floating roof slab was already presented in 1996 at the Biennale in Venice. Construction began ten years later. The building shell has been finished since October 2008, but it is still waiting to be developed. The concreting of the concrete roof, which has a diameter of 33 metres, a thickness of 50 centimetres, weighs approximately 125 tonnes, is inclined by 15 degrees and has a triangular cut-out in the centre, caused particular problems for the building contractors. It had to be ensured that the concrete would not slip due to the force of gravity (see article in opus C, issue 2/2009).

Abraham was not a man of compromises – he stuck unconditionally to his principles both in architecture and in life. In 2000 he caused uproar in Austria when he returned his Austrian passport and applied for citizenship of the USA in protest at the participation of the FPÖ in the government. With his stubbornness and his non-conformity he likewise enriched the architectural discussion again and again.

A memorial symposium took place on 11 June in Vienna under the title 'In Absence of Raimund Abraham'. It was organised jointly by the Austrian Museum of Applied Art (MAK) and the Studio Prix, Institute of Architecture, at the University of Applied Art in Vienna. Participants included Peter Eisenman, Eric Owen Moss, Wolf D. Prix and Lebbeus Woods.