The Tower of Amras
Mathias Bank &
Giacomo Pala

The Tower of Amras is a new architectural body; a new kind of tower. Normally, towers are seen as signals of power. They guarantee order, hierarchy, and presence. This project advocates for the contrary. It takes the tower as an ambiguous body, a building that reveals the wound of architectural representation.

Based on Thomas Bernhard’s Amras, the installation translates space and form into the loneliness and disorientation that define the novella. It depicts the tower’s disillusionment with daily life. It transforms the image of the castle into an unsettling memory, an echo, a whole composed of parts strangely conjunct.

The project develops all of this as a form of Seelenschwitzen, the ‘sweating of the soul’. Here, architecture materializes psychic pressure. Walls, openings, vertical movements, and warped allusions to Tyrolean landmarks produce a figure that seems to take in and sweat emotional weight. The installation picks up familiar features from the architectural language of Ambras Castle and the old town of Innsbruck, transforming them through stylization, flattening, and estrangement. Familiar shapes are still recognizable, but they no longer bring comfort. They confront us as estranged presences. Thus, the Tower of Amras deals with architecture as an emotional and cultural medium, capable of recording trauma, memory and repression.

At the heart of the project lies a radical inversion of monumental logic. Monuments traditionally aim to unify a collective body and stabilize public meaning. The Tower of Amras presents the fragments of an ambiguous representation. It functions as a counter-monument by de-stabilizing form. The tower becomes a collection of parts, fragments, and symbols. Its innermost tensions invoke fetishization and the return of a repressed.

Bernhard’s story of two brothers trapped in a tower after a family tragedy sets the emotional tone for the installation. That confinement here becomes a broader reflection on shared experiences of isolation, psychological stress, and collective disorientation; conditions that strongly resonate with our present. Through narrow corridors, sudden vertical openings, fractured openings, and shifting relationships between inside and outside, the interior creates a sense of poetic discomfort. Visitors move through a series of compressed and unstable spaces where orientation falters. A pulpit embedded within the structure provides an inversion of perspective.