Raimund Abraham's Last Building Completed

When architect Raimund Abraham died in a car crash in 2010, his most well known building was the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, a narrow sloping building of metal and glass in Midtown Manhattan. The building may have proven to be his only significant built work, except for a building under construction at the time of his death near Düsseldorf, Germany, and just completed in December 2013.

The round building with a canted roof – what has been called the "House for Music" and Abraham referred to as the "Quartet House" (for four musicians to live, work and play there) – sits above an unused NATO missile base in Karl-Heinrich Müller's Raketenstation Hombroich(Rocket Station Hombroich). In addition to Abraham's building, the Raketenstation includes buildings designed by Alvaro Siza and Tadao Ando, among others.

Abraham gained the commission through a meeting with sculptor Erwin Heerich (a friend of Müller's) at the 1996 Architecture Biennale in Venice. Construction did not start until 2006, and in part of the seven years until its completion it sat partially finished, awaiting financing. The building's main feature, the round roof, is pierced by a triangle in the center that points to one of the base's relics, the tower visible at left. The building displays Abraham's reliance upon Platonic shapes but also his poetic ways of making spaces and forms, in this case in concrete and wood.