Architecture Documentation

The Architecture Documentation Collection is the youngest in Salzburg Museum. The Salzburg architect Gerhard Garstenauer transferred his entire architecture archive to the museum in 2010, with the idea of collecting and preserving architectural works also of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and, most particularly, documenting building activities in the twentieth century. Thus, the designs, sketches, and plans of Gerhard Garstenauer form an important basic stock for the documentation of building in Salzburg in the last century and, together with seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century plans kept at present in the Graphics Collection, provide an overview of more than 400 years of building activities in Salzburg.

The holdings encompass the ground plan of the unrealised Scamozzi Cathedral of 1606, Baroque plans by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach and Lukas von Hildebrandt, which were assigned to the Graphics Collection because of their materiality, then numerous master builder plans from the nineteenth century, and important buildings by Salzburg architects of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The collection will be augmented with documentation of current building projects.

After it became known that a collection of architectural plans was now also set up at Salzburg Museum, several architectural bequests were transferred to it: among them were those of Josef Wessicken (1837–1918), Wunibald Deininger (1879–1963), Eduard Hütter (1880–1967), Martin Knoll (1888–1937) or Helmut Höpflinger (1922–2010), Fritz Kohlbacher (1924–1979), Felix Cevela (1922–2022), or Otto Reiter (1896–1958).

The collection currently comprises around 20,000 objects.

The majority of the collection comes to Salzburg Museum as donations – architects close their offices and dissolve their archives, or their heirs and descendants want to ensure the collection is preserved and well cared for.