Death and Middle Age

Raimund Abraham, Constellation 5, 2003

I don’t know about the life expectancy but one of the signs of the middle age is that suddenly people you personally know who are in their forties or fifties (plus minus ten years) start dying from natural causes (an occasionally unnatural causes). This is always a marker and extremely unsettling. It brings to the fore the thoughts about mortality, your start thinking about the “life’s score”. You start remembering your interactions with these people, the moments when they were in distress or more often when they were in a state of mental or professional exertion. Was it worth it?

Today someone emailed me about a man I worked with who died in January. “I am sure you know” read the email, but I didn’t. Half an hour later I saw in my RSS feed an announcement that my college professor was killed in a car accident in LA yesterday.

Now that I write about this suddenly it occurred to me that they both had one odd thing in common. Geoff Wodding spent his formative architectural years in Austria and Professor Raimund Abraham the designer of the Austrian Cultural Forum in NY is himself from Austria. Last week in Manhattan I saw a new building and as I looked at it I was thinking that the unusual roof line is exactly how I have done it in the Raimund’s class.