This book documents the Vienna Architecture Conference, which took place at the MAK-Austrian Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna in 1992. The participants consisted of architect popular with students (like me) at the time, some of which would become famous to a wider audience by the end of the decade: Zaha Hadid, Steven Holl, Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss, Coop Himmelblau, Carme Pinós, and Lebbeus Woods, whose drawing graces the cover. This was a time when their aggressive Deconstructivist forms were avant-garde reactions to Postmodern architecture; their architecture functioned as political statements for freedom over reactionary stances. This was a time before Coop Himmelblau designed a "brand-experience and car-delivery center" for BMW and Zaha Hadid realized an office building for the same carmaker. The words and images of the participants – assembled in individual statements and a roundtable discussion – hardly foreshadow their embrace of such corporations or the other ways they would change the course of architecture through built work rather than unbuilt projects and conversations. It's the words of Frank Gehry in the book's preface that are the most prescient, at least in hindsight: "I am optimistic that all of you [participants] will get work and make beautiful buildings and will not have to sit around and worry about the end of architecture." ( )