Veech Media Architecture (VMA) The architecture and design office Veech Media Architecture (VMA) was founded in Vienna in 1993 by Stuart A. Veech and Mascha Veech-Kosmatschof. VMA is an internationally active research-based studio with a wide spectrum of competence in the areas of corporate architecture, TV & On-Air branding, media technology and design prototyping. VMA’s focus on research and development of new forms of integration and the reciprocal effects of content, space and media responds to the challenges of real/virtual communication within contemporary cultural contexts – a new architecture typology. Since they first started Veech Media Architecture (VMA) in 1993, partners Stuart A. Veech and Mascha Kosmatschof-Veech have been creating temporary installations that stretch the public‘s perception of what comprises architecture by seamlessly mixing unconventional materials with media feats based in digital deep space influenced by the work of the British visionary Cedric Price-who was more interested in devising short-term structures that fully realize buildings-and other forward-thinking architects to come out of the Architectural Association in the 1960s, VMA has focused primarily on exhibition design and travelling pavilions that present a soft interface between viewer and structure. The Stephansdom visitation, for one, was a temporary structure that contained an exhibition celebrating the diversity of languages spoken in the European Union. A seeming manifestation of William Burroughs’s assertion that “language is a virus from outer space,” he pavilion blends architecture ,graphics, and visitors in an interior unhindered by borders and obstacles. VMA’s set design for Austria’s ORF network newsroom, on the other hand, was created to be maximally telegenic-and as such is probably the most familiar architectural interior in the entire country. While the newsrooms design had to function on a practical level-accommodating different programs, sets, and activities in a roughly 4,000-squared-foot space-it also has to work as an abstract space that was reconstructed day after day by four different studio cameras. In VMA’s project, cameras and screens are never far away. In the case of A_World, a project for the European insurance company Allianz, the studio set forth a prototype multimedia and exhibition center whose biomorphic core formed a screen against which images could be projected. in addition, individual media terminals would be placed in translucent vertical platforms at each level of the building so that the public could not only be passive spectators of the multimedia projections, but active participants. Thus in VMA’s typical manner, distinctions between exterior and interior, passive and active, and real and virtue come to the fore. Although the studio bears the mark of its time-a thoroughgoing engagement with the possibilities of digital tools and the forms they can create-VMA’s projects never fail to engage the human body. Zaha Hadid 10×10_2: 100 Architects 10 Critics Phaidon Press, 2005 Veech Media Architecture (VMA) is designing real environments for an increasingly virtual world. Linking media and architecture in innovative ways they create new forms of spatial communication for the information age. Against the backdrop of a world incessantly flooded by information VMA explores the potential of design to generate a spatial ecology of information. The intricate integration of media and architecture has proven crucial for this ecology of information. Just as media animates space with information, architecture gives information a spatial and tangible dimension. Ultimately media is just another material of architecture, and architecture just another scale of media.


form follows program The work of VMA materializes in ever changing ways and in wildly differing contexts. Inhabiting their professional territory in a nomadic way VMA is equally at home in different fields of design. Aside from their aquired expertise in state-of-the-art television studio design, they work as well in exhibition design, event design, temporary urban installations, but also projects of architectural scale such as brandscapes and cultural buildings. As a result from their multi-faceted exploration of design they have cultivated a unique trans-disciplinary competence which enables them to produces innovation by constantly drawing relationships between architecture, media, technology and communication. This flexible and creative management of knowledge and their high expertise in different fields make VMA also an competent consultant and developer of programmatic architectural strategies.


form follows material Common to all of VMA’s project is an their creative use of materials. Drawing from the material innovations of the most contemporary manufacturing processes, VMA constantly experiment with new materials that were originally developed for producing aircrafts, cars, textiles or media environments. This way they not only broaden the traditional material canon of architecture, but also make it receptive for emerging expressions of technology. The novelty of such materials is used to invent new forms of space, representation and communication that would not have been possible before.


think global – be global Rather than merely designing objects or spaces VMA designs the conditions for an exchange of information between different times and places for different communities in the context of our globalized world – an inclination surely due in part to the transnational bias of VMA’s priniciples. Chicago-born Stuart Veech and Mascha Veech-Kosmatschof from Moscow had met while studying at the Architectural Association in London and decided to set up offices in 1993 in Vienna. With a small team infrastructure and diverse interests they have developed a unique approach to the question of architecture in the 21st century as the intersection of space and media, design and communication.


Andreas Ruby, 2006