THE PROJECT

Businesses not only shape the identity of a city through their outward appearance, they always have been and still continue to be indispensable establishments providing convenient shopping, but also places to meet and communicate. The loss of a company of this kind is thus always also a disturbance in the social framework of the city, whose consequences and effects may become apparent very immediately or sometimes only in the long term.

For many years, we have been forced to note the disappearance, transformation or repurposing of Vienna’s traditional businesses and their shopfronts. This is why, in 2009, we began our project “Shops with history – sundry goods in Vienna”: taking the form of a work in progress, it involves a continuous photographic documentation of the businesses that still exist. In 2018 we took things a step further by adding the comparative photographic study SPURENSUCHE, which deals with the changes that have taken place: old photographs of the businesses were juxtaposed with the new situations that had developed.

In Vienna, shopfront architecture has a long and remarkable tradition: Adolf Loos, Otto Wagner or Josef Hoffmann for earlier examples and Hans Hollein, Hermann Czech or Coop-Himmelblau for the later ones – to provide just a brief sampling. Their work has already been extensively discussed, acknowledged and documented. Our interest is not so much in such classics of shopfront design; instead, it is above all the ordinary shopfronts of traditional retail shops and small businesses and service providers that we wish to capture. They can be found in every district of Vienna and in all kinds of locations, and they often stick out among the shopfronts of the shifting businesses around them. Architecturally they are usually idiosyncratic and unique, but they are often of only minor historical or aesthetic interest.

We select the businesses on the basis of the individual design of their shopfronts, typographically interesting lettering, their area of business, the design of their window displays or their unusual selection of goods. Through a focus on uniformly framed views, freed as much as possible from any distracting elements of their surroundings, we additionally seek to generate a serial character in the images, which provides the extremely diverse shopfronts with an equal force of presence.

We understand our work in terms of snapshots of these characteristic urban features caught in a process of rapid change. We have now captured over 500 businesses, and more than half of these photographs can already be seen here in our online gallery.