Anna Margaretha Hohmann-Vogrin 1946-2009

Anna Margaretha Hohmann-Vogrin, assistant professor at the Institute for Urbanism on the Graz University for Technology, had started her field research in Mesoamerica already during her architectural studies in 1970 and continued her research on Maya sites and Maya architecture with more than 20 trips almost until her untimely demise.

With contributions in scientific journals, lectures at Mayaists meetings and last but not least, in her dissertation and postdoctoral thesis she presented her scientific findings. Due to her intensive commitment with the themes of city building and city planning Hohmann-Vogrin wrote many essays and articles in that area and kept her university teaching texts always on the last stand. Very early she learned about the Space Syntax, developed by Hillier and Hanson, and recognized this system as a valuable tool in urbanism. She became a member of the international SS group and integrated SS in her courses at the University. Her deep knowledge in anthropology and philosophy led her to find thoughts and insights in a form of combining architecture and humanities.

We did select those texts from her archive, which seemed to be the most important ones to us. The English contributions were written by her and are not translations.

The following quotation shows clearly the thinking of Hohmann-Vogrin on Maya architecture: “From the building alone one may extract without further interpretation, that space has been structured by organizing straight lines, whose continuous change and over building time manifests itself in. The changing space becomes built time.”