Boris Podrecca

Boris Podrecca (born 30 January 1940) is a Slovene-Italian architect and urban designer living in Vienna, Austria. Podrecca is considered by some critics a pioneer of postmodernism. He took a new, more tolerant attitude towards historical architectural forms with some of his early works, such as the neuro-physiological institute at Starhemberg Palace,

Biography He was born in Belgrade, Kingdom of Yugoslavia (now Serbia), to a Slovene father and a Serb mother. His father was a Slovene immigrant from the Italian border region known as Julian March (Venezia Giulia), who had fled to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia to escape persecution from the Italian Fascist regime. His original Slovene surname, Podreka, had been Italianized to Podrecca in the early 1930s. After World War II, the family moved to Trieste, Italy, where Boris attended a Slovene language elementary school.

In the 1960s, he moved to Vienna to study architecture at the TU Wien, where he graduated in 1968 with Professor Roland Rainer. From 1979 to 1981 he worked as an assistant at Technical University of Munich and later, as a guest lecturer at Lausanne, Paris, Venice, Philadelphia, London, Harvard-Cambridge, Boston and Vienna. From 1988 until 2006 he was full professor at the Technical University of Stuttgart and Director of the Institute of Architectural Design and Theory of Space. He is a foreign member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Boris Podrecca became famous with the exhibition of the work of the architect Carlo Scarpa in the church of Chiesa della Carita at the 1984 Venice Biennale and later the Villes d'Eaux exhibition in Paris. He was also responsible for the exhibition of the work of Jože Plečnik in the Pompidou Centre in Paris (1986). As a leading exhibition designer, he set up the Biedermeier (Vienna, 1987), Bismarck, Prussia, Germany and Europe (Berlin, 1990) and One Hundred Years of Austria exhibitions (1996).

Main works

Tartini Square, Piran, Slovenia, 1987–1989 Piazza XXIV Maggio, Cormons, Italy, 1989–1990 Dirmhirngasse School, Vienna, 1991–1994 Museum of Modern Art, Ca' Pesaro, Venice, 1992–2002 Greif-Areal mixed-use development, Bolzano, Italy, 1992–2000 Judeca Nova Apartments, Giudecca, Venice, 1995–2003 "In der Wiesen" Social Housing, Vienna, 1996–2000 Millennium Tower, Handelskai, Vienna, 1997–1999 Railway Square, Krems an der Donau, Austria, 1997 Hotel and Conference Centre, Mons, Ljubljana, 2000–2004 City Square, Motta di Livenza, Italy, 2001–2002 Praterstern Urban Square, Vienna, 2002–2008 VBio Center 1, Vienna, 2003–2005 Skidome und Multi-Functional Center, Garching bei München, Germany, 2005 Punta Skala Resort, Zadar, Croatia, 2005 Station San Pasquale, Naples, Italy, 2006 Šumi Center, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2006 Science and Technology Museum, Belgrade, Serbia, 2007 Civic-Cultural Centre in Ajdovščina, Slovenia, 2010 Grain Bridge, Ljubljana, 2010 PP1 project (skyscraper and "city cottages"), Padua, 2010 Hotel Falkensteiner, Belgrade, Serbia, 2012

Awards 1986: Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Paris 1990: Kulturpreis für Architektur, Vienna 1992: Jože Plečnik Award, Ljubljana 1996: Honorary Member of the Federation of German Architects 2000: Honorary degree of the University of Maribor, Slovenia 2003: Liberty Award by the President of the Republic of Slovenia