RAIMUND ABRAHAM (1933–2010)

Austrian architect Raimund Abraham, best known in this country for his knife-thin 2002 Austrian Cultural Forum building in Manhattan, was killed in a car crash in downtown Los Angeles early yesterday morning, according to a report from the Southern California Institute of Architecture. Abraham was a visiting faculty member this term at SCI-Arc and delivered a lecture at the school Wednesday night, reports the Los Angeles Times.

Born in Tyrol in 1933, Abraham spent most of his adult life in New York and began teaching at Manhattan’s Cooper Union School of Architecture in 1971. He beat out more than two hundred other entries to win a competition for the Austrian Cultural Forum, which the architectural historian Kenneth Frampton, who served on the jury that chose Abraham for the commission, called “the most significant modern piece of architecture to be realized in Manhattan since the Seagram Building and the Guggenheim Museum of 1959.”