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One year ago: architect Raimund Abraham

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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.

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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.

RELATED:

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

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