As a student at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Kammerer won the triennial Rosenbaum Prize at the end of his second year, with this project for a royal hunting tent. Intended as a temporary ceremonial structure, the three-sided bamboo and canvas construction was designed to be a lavish representation of monarchy rather than a purely functional object. Kammerer's symbolic architectural language includes sculptural papyrus-leaf motifs and silk tapestries depicting hunting scenes lining the tent's interior. Stenciled patterning adorns the exterior walls.
Kammerer was a student of the Austrian architect Otto Wagner, whose instruction in the incorporation of art, architecture, and design within a _Gesamtkunstwerk—_a “total work of art”—is evident in the aesthetic qualities of this meticulously wrought drawing. Kammerer went on to become a renowned painter and architect.
Gallery label from 75 Years of Architecture at MoMA, 2007.
In Vienna, the movement to reform the applied arts centered on textiles in a variety of ways. The design of this temporary structure, for example, was inspired by the writings of nineteenth-century architect and cultural theorist Gottfried Semper, who linked the origins of the practice of building to the draping of rugs or blankets over a basic structural frame. In the 1890s Viennese curator Alois Riegl also wrote about weaving as the primeval form of art from which all others, including architecture, had evolved.
Gallery label from October 21, 2019–Spring 2020
