Raimund Abraham, an architect who was known primarily for his visionary drawings of mostly unrealizable projects but whose Austrian Cultural Forum, a slim skyscraper in midtown Manhattan completed in 2002, was hailed as one of the most exciting New York buildings in decades, died Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 76 and lived in Manhattan and Mexico City.
He died in a car accident, said Joan Springhetti, a spokeswoman for the Southern California Institute of Architecture, where Abraham taught and had given a lecture a few hours before his death.
Abraham, an Austrian by birth, worked and taught in the United States since 1964, primarily at the Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture in New York.
He influenced a generation of architectural students as much through his insistence on the socially ennobling role of architecture, and its integrity as a discipline, as through his work.
Although he considered himself a functionalist, Abraham said he believed in the role of the architect as a creator of sacred spaces and as an explorer of the gloomier chambers of the human soul. Danger and risk haunted his work.
“If I did not include the anticipation of terror in my architecture, it would not be worth anything,” he said in a 2001 interview.
He is survived by a daughter, Una, of Vienna.
