Peter Noever is an Austrian designer and curator-at-large of art, architecture and media. During his over 25 years as Artistic Director and CEO of the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art (MAK) in Vienna, Peter Noever stripped the museum of its museum-like qualities, cut through bureaucracy, oversaw sweeping renovations, and expanded existing facilities, in the process redefining the MAK in a radical way and infusing it with contemporary art. He also created and achieved the worldwide establishment of the “MAK” trademark and brand as such. Noever founded the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, with its Schindler Artists and Architects-in-Residence Program in West Hollywood (Los Angeles), in 1994, adding to it the MAK program UFI – Urban Future Initiative in 2010. As an exhibition creator, Noever has conceived and/or curated over 350 exhibitions in Vienna as well as in Los Angeles, Venice, New York, Moscow, Tokyo, Berlin, Prague, Brtnice, Budapest, Shenzhen (China), St. Petersburg, Havana, and elsewhere.
Your secret art venue when you seek peace and quiet
The secret remains secret if one doesn’t try to decode it! CAT* (Contemporary Art Tower) in the center of Vienna is such a mystical place which I keep very strongly in my mind. In my mind only.
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*The planning team Peter Noever, Sepp Müller and Michael Embacher have developed in 2000 a radically new programmatic strategy that comes up to the complex requirements of today’s artistic productions. CAT suggests to adapt an antiaircraft tower in Vienna’s Arenbergpark built in 1942, a memorial to never forget the Nazi regime and its war, to an international center for contemporary art. After intense study of the CAT project, Jenny Holzer and James Turrell have worked out artistic interventions for the site.
The project CAT could not be fully realized.But even so, the now closed off Contemporary Art Tower of the MAK is home to an outstanding collection of contemporary art, architecture, and design. It includes works by over 60 renowned and pioneering artists, architects, and designers including Vito Acconci, Lebbeus Woods, Chris Burden, Walter Pichler, Franz West, Helmut Lang, Otto Mühl, Padhi Frieberger, Eva Schlegel, Rudi Stanzel, Hans Weigand, Manfred Wakolbinger, Gregor Eichinger, Frank Gehry, Wolf Prix, Zaha Hadid, Günther Domenig, Heinrich Dunst, Georg Driendl, Raimund Abraham, Friedrich Kiesler, Hans Hollein, Gordon Matta-Clark, Ilya Kabakov, and Donald Judd.
The best food experience in an art space
Lunch with the outstanding New Yorker artist Tom Sachs in his self-designed Mars Mission Control center with HNDS (“Hot Nuts Delivery System”).
A museum gift shop that you never leave empty handed
Any of the countless Mozart museums in the country with those beautiful, ambitious gifts – so called Mozart’s balls.
Your museum with a wow-factor
The Melnikov House, in Moscow, designed by Konstantin Melnikov (1927–29) – if it becomes a center for avantgarde contemporary architecture and not a “house museum”.
Please share with us a special personal memory related to a museum experience
Vito Acconci: “I do things in the closet – I can read about it, write about it, design it, but I don’t actually do it.”
