BD24 in BA25 grafike za spletno stran in fb

Focus Austria: Architecture and Design That Reflect and Shape Their Time

Editorial Introduction

For the first edition of the BIG SEE Focus, we turn our attention to Austria, a country with a strong and consistent design culture that remains both responsive to the present and rooted in long-term thinking. With Focus Austria, we set out to capture something beyond aesthetic excellence, something more urgent, more vital. What we discovered was a creative culture in motion: architects and designers working not just with form and function, but with foresight, risk, and radical intent.

In Focus Austria selection, we present projects that vary in scale, method, and material, yet they are united by a shared ambition: to shape the future before it arrives. In reviewing recent architectural, interior, and product design projects, disciplines that inherently respond to the needs of their contemporary moment while also shaping it through material and spatial expression, we discovered in Austria a remarkable balance between the timely and the timeless.

A common thread in architecture is the dialogue with the past: preserving origins, building upon existing structures, and allowing the old to illuminate the new. Renovation becomes a tool for transformation rather than erasure, offering solid foundations for innovation. New structures learn from the past, while space becomes an active tool for unlocking new ways of living and working, ways that older spatial typologies may have once constrained. Across the selected works, architecture emerges as a forward-looking practice: rethinking how we live, work, and connect, while proposing new spatial, social, and ecological models that respond to contemporary needs and anticipate future possibilities.

In the field of product design, we observed a strong and consistent commitment to quality—not only in materials and production, but also in conceptual development and long-term usability. Regardless of whether it is a concept, a small-batch product, or a large-scale industrial series, the focus remains on the user. The design process reflects systematic thinking, where each decision consciously informs the next. The result is contemporary product design that embraces repairability, recyclability, and a reduced ecological footprint.

Across the board, what stands out is not just how things look, but how they work, and why they are the way they are. This is design with intention, where thinking and making go hand in hand. In Austria, design is more than form, it’s a thought process. It’s where innovation meets heritage, and where every element has a purpose.