Salzburg Unbuilt

This exhibition explored rejected ideas, failed concepts and utopias for Salzburg, thereby revealing the city in a new light. Over the centuries many outstanding architects have helped to shape the city’s unique character. Their plans were not always put into practice. For this exhibition, around thirty projects were chosen from a vast number of studies and competition submissions, focusing on the twentieth century. The designs are arranged by subject and deal with recurring problems and open questions of urban planning.

Visitors were confronted by the fascinating but also oppressive question of what the city would have looked like if, for example, Vicenzo Scamozzi’s design for a cathedral in 1606 had been built instead of the much smaller version by Santino Solari, constructed between 1614 and 1628. How would the Salzburg Festival have turned out if Hans Poelzig’s mystic vision in 1920 for a festival hall on the grounds of Hellbrunn Palace had been adopted? The exhibition also looked at conflicting concepts and architectural ideas, such as Álvaro Siza’s suggested reconstruction of Casino Winkler (1986), Delugan_Meissl’s panorama lift (2003) on the side of the Mönchsberg, and Hans Hollein’s epochal Guggenheim-Museum (from 1989). These projects were designed for this very place, and therefore, the exhibition also told the architectural history of the Museum der Moderne Salzburg. With this in mind, Museum der Moderne Salzburg invited everyone living in or visiting Salzburg to think about the city’s future.

The projects shown in Salzburg Unbuilt could not be experienced in reality. The exhibition itself was understood as a text in which the drawings, plans, and models are the letters, the projects the words, and the thematic sections the narrative. This text was inscribed in the museum as a storyline about the history of the city.