Artist Walter Pichler Dies at 75

Walter Pichler, an architect who became a prominent artist in the postwar avant-garde movement in Austria, with time away from creating art to move to a farm and construction work above himself Please, died July 16 at home in Burgenland, Austria. He was 75.

The cause was cancer, said his assistant, Alois Hörtl.

Mr. Pichler was a sculptor and illustrator works include a white, torpedo-shaped hull with a TV inside ("Portable Living Room"), a rusty bed frame supporting a humanoid form, divided by irregular sheets of glass, and many fantastic designs of underground facilities, including the cities and floating palaces.

His architectural drawings were not only the plans, there were also works of art in itself. More pictures - pictures of "dream" as he said - were dark and psychologically loaded. His figures are often skeletal, or robotics.

"In the 1960's was a small group of Austrian architects who have taken a visionary approach and made images of architecture that completely defied the status quo," said Barry Bergdoll, chief curator architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, which owns 16 of the drawings of Mr. Pichler. The group also included the architects Hans Hollein and Raimund Abraham, who won international fame.

The group designs challenge the modernist architecture, which stressed the role and often produced crude buildings without ornaments and dominated by concrete and metal.

"They have begun to explore the emotional resonance of architecture," Bergdoll said. "A building can tell a story rather than a feature." Mr. Pichler liked the design of the buildings being built.

In an essay he wrote, "this is what you resume architectural functionalism that no longer works." He proclaimed. "What you ask is an architecture that fascinates"

Walter Pichler was born October 1, 1936, in New West, northern Italy. He studied art at the Hochschule für Architektur in Vienna and began working as an architect in 1950.

Mr. Pichler converted farm building to house the figure and then began altering the half-dozen other buildings, or for that property, the installation of one of his sculptures in each them.

One consists of two cylindrical containers of cement with a system of channels that collect water and wells. The sculptures and buildings that sheltered them has become his life's work.

The works were "very bright, dark, menacing, mechanical," said Gladstone, a comparison of a number of Darth Vader, the villain of Star Wars movies.

"He really built these statues to himself," said Mrs. Gladstone. "I did not want to jeopardize anything, and if he worked for himself, was not necessary."

Mr. Pichler is survived by his wife, Elves, and their daughter, Anna Tripamer.