Carl Auböck
Designer, Architect & Maker in fourth generation.
The workshop Carl Auböck (Auboeck) exists now over 125 years and for four generations. Karl Heinrich Auböck I was a goldsmith and founded in the Bernardgasse in the 7th district of Vienna a bronze goods company. His son Carl Auböck II was a painter and designer and had studied at the Bauhaus and developed since the 1940s also because of his Bauhaus contacts and his friendships such with Walter Gropius the existing workshop in the direction of "Modernist Design".
His son Carl Auböck III was trained after the Second World War as an apprentice in the operation of the father as a belt man and Ziseleur. He also studied architecture. In the 70s to 80s, Carl Auböck III realized many well-known single-family dwellings, such as residential buildings in Vienna, without neglecting his thriving workshop.
Even Carl Auböck II pursued the claim to transfer the high quality standards of handmade unique pieces to the industrial serial production and to be able to achieve a democratic ideal of the highest possible quality for all. This goal was pursued very successfully by architect designer Carl Auböck III until the 1990s.
Carl Auböck III was a representative of a factual, based on international role models Modernism. His special interests were industrial, serial prefabrication of components and industrial design. For him, the task fields of architecture and design merged, and his design concept included the design of everyday utensils as well as urban planning.
From the 1970s onward, Carl Auböck's focus shifted to design in the narrower sense, which had accompanied him since the beginning of his career: from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s, a period of intense collaboration with his father , he used biomorphic forms. The light, on slender wooden legs or steel round tubes resting seating were influenced by Charles Eames. From the early 1950s, strictly geometric shapes and the reduction to black and white contrasts became more important.
In the field of industrial design, Auböck III worked as a designer for numerous well-known manufacturers. His designs include a microscope, a calculator, a heel-heel binding and numerous award-winning cutlery for Amboss Austria (Neuzeughammer). These include the 2060 cutlery series from 1955, which is so popular among design aficionados and which received the gold medal at the 1958 world exhibition in Brussels. This cutlery series is also part of the Contemporum design collection.
Today, the workshop of Carl Auböck IV - also an architect and designer, of course - continues to be operated and further developed. Some very interesting designs that we offer here come from his hand. In 2022, daughter Zola Auböck joined the company in the fifth generation. The future of the workshop and the archive with its more than 4,500 drafts thus seems secured, at least for the next 30 years. We are very happy about it.
And now in 2024/25 the Werkstätte Carl Auböck is celebrating 2 major retrospectives in Vienna:
“ICONIC AUBÖCK - A Workshop Shapes Austria’s Concept of Design“ in the MAK Museum of Applied Arts, Stubenring 5, 1010 Vienna, AT until January 6th, 2025 https://www.mak.at/en/iconicauboeck
„From Tableware to a Prefabricated Housing: The Architect and Designer Carl Auböck (1924–1993)“ in the Az W Architekturzentrum Wien, Museumsplatz 1 // MQ 1070 Vienna, AT until November 4th, 2024 https://www.azw.at/en/event/vom-besteck-zur-fertighaussiedlung-der-architekt-und-designer-carl-auboeck/
Products from Carl Auböck
