Sondermodelle

Peter Fritz (1916-1992) was a Viennese insurance clerk who built 1:87 scale models of buildings as a hobby. After his death, the bulk of his model-building output ended up in a bric-a-brac shop where it was found by artist Oliver Croy. Croy immediately recognized Fritz as a folk-architect of considerable naive talent, and put the models on display at various art galleries. Croy documented 422 separate models (some are missing from the collection and survive only as photographs taken by Fritz), and they're all original, apparently not based on any real-world prototypes.

Fritz was a real iconoclast about materials. His buildings are constructed out of whatever he could get his hands on. Outside walls are frequently made of wallpaper samples, signage was either clipped from magazines or punched out with an embossing label maker, bent nails were used as drainage pipes, ornate logos from cigarette packs turn up as coats of arms over doors, etc. Every once in a while, there are model railroad structure parts -- window frames, outdoor furniture, etc. -- but most of the time, Fritz built with chipboard and cheap junk. My favorite found material: he used pages from a Schreiber-Bogen papercraft castle model, but not in the intended way; he just chopped up the printed sheet to use the printed textures as he saw fit. One consequence of his unconventional choices of materials is that none of the buildings are remotely realistic; they're more like three-dimensional sketches or collages.

There is a wide range of types of buildings -- allotment buildings, single-family houses, villas, Alpine buildings, schools, banks, swimming pools, etc. There's even a single, playful "Geisterbahn" (Ghost Train, or dark ride).

While this is primarily a visual art book, there are six essays about miniatures, and each chapter showcasing a new type of building begins with a 250-word essay. Many of the 29 writers of these introductions come from a tradition of art and architecture criticism, so there is a pretentious tone to a lot of their essays, as if writing about a folk artist were a bit beneath them. There are a couple criticisms of second floors that would be too small to stand up in, or stairwells that couldn't work in the real world, but hey, I've walked through a Frank Lloyd Wright house where I had to duck on the stairs so I wouldn't hit my head. To hell with those writers. There are a few writers who find something to admire in Fritz's designs, and fewer still who offer any insights into the models.

Personally, I love every dusty, cattawumpus building in this collection. Each is marvelously inventive and yet it simultaneously reflects traditional or modern Austrian architecture... in a funhouse mirror.

One critique of the landscape format of the book -- it's quite heavy for such a small book, and the mass of pages pulls at the top of the spine. I think it's most safely stored spine down on a bookshelf.

Essays are in German with parallel English translation.