CITY WITHOUT QUALITIES
The City Without Qualities is a fictional metropolis based on a real city where national claims, multicultural ties and divided loyalties overlap. Inspired by the novel „Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften“ by Robert Musil (1930), Wolfgang Lehrner traces the last or lost mitteleuropean archipelago and thereby generates „The City without Qualities“.
The City without Qualities finds it much easier to explain what it is not, what differentiates it from any other reality, than to define its own identity. The City Without Qualities loves its heterogeneity, its diversity of elements that cannot be merged into a unity. It is rich in contrasts, but above all it seeks its reason of existence in these very contrasts and in their indissolubility.**
At the crossroads of Latin, Slavic and Germanic cultures, the city has had to change its nationality several times but paradoxically is still called città mitteleuropea: different peoples, different politics, different streets, different languages in difficult times – this city survives it all!
No.1
The City Without Qualities is a fictional metropolis based on a real town where national claims, multicultural ties and divided loyalties overlap.*
No.2
The City Without Qualities has difficulties defining itself in positive terms. It finds it much easier to declare what it is not, what differentiates it from any other reality, than to define its own identity.
No.3
The City Without Qualities does not attach much importance to its name, lost its own dialect but is proud of its multilingualism and its location at the crossroads of Latin, Slavic and Germanic cultures.
No.4
The City Without Qualities changed its nationality several times in the 20th century and was even granted the status of an independent city-state under the protection of the United Nations as a Free Territory for 7 years.
No.5
The City Without Qualities loves its heterogeneity, its diversity of elements that cannot be merged into a unity. It is rich in contrasts, but above all it seeks its reason of existence in these very contrasts and in their indissolubility.**
No.6
The City Without Qualities is a city that doesn’t attract the visitors eye at the first site although it loves all strains of modernist architecture as neorealism, rationalism, brutalism and the international style.
No.7
The City Without Qualities is a city without landmarks and the pioneer of every generic city. It has no specific reference points, either to its history or its residents. „…The city is no longer. We can leave the theatre now.“ ***
No.8
The City Without Qualities is also called città mitteleuropea but fell into a peripheral position for decades as a result of the East-West conflict.
No.9
The City Without Qualities has lost its importance as a leading city in business, trade and commerce, but with its free port it is still one of the largest international hubs in the region.
No.10
The City Without Qualities finally stands for more. Does its distinctiv quality derive from the eloquence of having less out of more, from not being defined and, through this, having enough freedom and space for further growth and thoughts?
* „but if there is a sense of reality, (…) then there must also be something we can call a sense of possibility (…) so the sense of possibility could be defined outright as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not.“ Robert Musil: The Man Without Qualities (1930)
** Claudio Magris, Angelo Ara, Triest. Eine literarische Hauptstadt in Mitteleuropa, 1993
*** Rem Koolhaas, The Generic City, 1994