Boris Podrecca is one of the most famous contemporary European architects of the middle generation. Apart from being a professor at Stuttgart Technical University and director of the Institute for Interior Design and Planning (since 1988), he is frequently invited to give lectures at various universities all over Europe and the United States. Birkhauser publishers recently issued a monograph on Podrecca by Walter Zschokke, a well-known writer on architecture; the introduction to the monograph was written by the even more famous Friedrich Achleitner. For years, Podrecca's architecture studio in Vienna has attracted students and young graduates of architecture from across Europe, who wish to spend at least a short period of time in Podrecca's Meisterschule. In addition to this, Podrecca has always been one of the voices of Slovene culture, which in his youth formed him and with which he has maintained a living, working contact.

He was born in 1940 in Belgrade to a Herzegovian mother and Slovene father. After the war, the family moved to Trieste, where he spent his childhood and attended Slovene grammar school. His drawing teacher at the grammar school was a famous Trieste painter and former avant-garde constructivist, Avgust ^ernigoj, whose fervour and directness awakened the creativity of the young Podrecca. Before the end of his school days, the family moved to Vienna, where he finished grammar school and enrolled both in the architecture department of the Technical University and the Academy of Fine Arts. He graduated in architecture in 1968 under Professor Roland Rainer. He founded an architecture studio in Vienna and slowly made his way to the very top of Viennese and, later, European architecture. From 1979 to 1981 he worked as an assistant at Munich Technical University and later, as a guest lecturer, he toured different schools of architecture in Europe and the States.

His first mature works, which date from the early 1980s, are in line with the new trends of European and world architecture. In them, he occasionally draws on the work of architect Jo`e Ple~nik, to whose Viennese oeuvre he drew attention as a student when he set up an exhibition in the crypt of Ple~nik's Church of the Holy Spirit in Ottakring (1967). Podrecca could perhaps be called one of the pioneers of postmodernism and its later branch of deconstructivism - of course, without all the negative connotations with which the two expressions later became associated. With some of his early works, such as the neuro-physiological institute at Stahremberg Palace (1982), the offices of the advertising agency in Vojcik Villa and a studio in the adjacent park (1982, 1986) and a number of other works, he introduced the following new elements to modernist architecture: he took a new, more tolerant attitude towards historical and all other handed-down forms; he re-introduced the column; he included technological achievements in the working of various materials in an effort to reaffirm precious detail; and from a new angle, he reopened the discussion of the role of light and, later, of the role of pure, bright colour in contemporary architecture. It is impossible to claim that he was the first to introduce all of these new elements, for postmodernism was born simultaneously in several parts of the world. But he was undoubtedly the figure who gave legitimacy to these new trends in Central Europe and who, with a refined finishing of detail, defined new criteria of quality together with other representatives of postmodernism in the West.

His other significant achievements in Vienna are his work on the Humanic Casapiccola shopping centre, the Palmers shop (1989), the interior design of the First Austrian Savings Bank (1993) - here, interior design is executed in an almost programmatic, classic deconstructivist style - and the renovation of the Slovene student dormitory at Korotan into a cultural centre for Carinthian Slovenes in Vienna. Two of his more important projects which demand a more visible intrusion into the urban fabric are the administrative centre of the Basler insurance company (1993) and the plan for the school complex at Dirmhirngasse (1995). After family houses and apartment buildings, with which he started his career, he undertook mass apartment construction with apartment blocks at Kapellenweg (1993) in Vienna and terraced houses in Lab and Walde (1994). He has participated in a number of public competitions, mostly in Germany, where new opportunities constantly seem to arise for him.

Boris Podrecca earned a formidable reputation setting up exhibitions in the major European cultural centres. He became famous with the exhibition of the work of the architect Carlo Scarpa in the church of Chiesa della Carita at the 1984 Venice Biennial, securing his reputation with the Villes d'Eaux exhibition in Paris. As a leading exhibition designer he set up the Biedermeier (Vienna, 1987), Bismarck, Prussia, Germany and Europe (Berlin, 1990) and One Hundred Years of Austria exhibitions (1996). The latter was extremely successful. He was also responsible for the exceptionally effective exhibition of the work of Jo`e Ple~nik in the Pompidou Centre in Paris (1986).