One year ago: architect Raimund Abraham

One year ago, Austrian architect Raimund Abraham was killed in a car accident in downtown Los Angeles, only hours after delivering a lecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. He was 76.

Abraham was best known for designing the Austrian Cultural Forum building in New York City that opened in 2002.

In the wake of the architect's death, Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne, who wrote the obituary, went on to consider Abraham's monumental knife-thin building in Manhattan in the context of plans for a new American embassy in London:

How should an architect approach the task of designing a building to represent his home country abroad? What happens if the result -- implicitly or explicitly -- is critical of that country's past, politics or most cherished values?

Click here to read more about the issue in Hawthorne's column a few weeks after Abraham's death.

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Obituary: Raimund Abraham dies at 76; Austrian-born architect, theorist and teacher

-- Claire Noland

Photo: Facade of Austrian Cultural Forum building. Credit: Matt Campbell / Agence France-Presse / Getty Images