Martin Ritzinger
I write about fictional characters, landscapes, societies and buildings. Some of my stories highlight the characters‘ impressions of the buildings – particularly with regard to the use of space, spatial development, but also construction, materials, light, sound and weather. These texts are listed under the menu item Kosmos Explorations as architectural prose.
Based on my architectural prose, I design the buildings described therein. In addition, I deal with architectural planning methods that focus on the use of space in terms of spatial levels, openings and height differences. Conversely, I understand cities and buildings as compositions of barriers, thresholds and barriers that frame social interaction through abstract corridors between rigidity and fluidity.
As a balance to usage- and function-oriented planning, I paint and draw pictures of the buildings as part of the design process – watercolour, oil, ink.
I perceive my texts, images and designs as the contents of my Kosmos. I am the designer and explorer of my Kosmos.
I was born in 1984 in Zell am See in the province of Salzburg. After completing my humanities education at the Academic Gymnasium in Salzburg City, I did my military service in the Austrian Armed Forces and gained experience in the healthcare sector, as I had already done during my school days.
From 2003 to 2013, I studied architecture at the Vienna University of Technology, focusing on the topics of space utilisation and functions, related planning methods, mathematical logic, mathematical complexity theory and computer programming – including an exciting study visit to Tongji University in Shanghai in 2010 and three summer academies in Salzburg, Ljubljana, Shanghai.
I obtained my degree in architecture with a thesis on the functional value of staircase architecture, supervised by Dr. Harald Trapp and Professor Dr. Christian Kühn (both then at the Vienna University of Technology, Institute of Architecture and Design, Department of Building Theory).
After a few forays into the practical side of things at architecture and civil engineering firms, an intensive private construction project, and some hustling as a source of ideas in the general start-up scene, I got to study (digital) gnomonics (basically, the science of similarities) with Professor Vera Bühlmann, Professor Elias Zafiris, and Professor Ludger Hovestadt.
From the beginning of 2019, I was a member of the AKT architecture collective before returning to exploring my own Kosmos as an independent researcher in mid-2020.
Through my studies of gnomonics and the insights I gained, I began practising writing dialogues and short stories in 2017. In addition to writing, I took up painting and renewed my interest in practical and theoretical mathematics, as well as computer programming (Rust, Haskell, Mathematica, C#, Python).
Thus, architectural design, visual arts, writing and mathematics – the latter both as an object of study and as a compass – form the cycles of creation and exploration of my Kosmos.
Martin Ritzinger 