Pembaurblock inner courtyard

In the late 1920s, pioneering building projects were realised in Innsbruck. Franz Baumann designed, based on the internationally popular White modernitythe stations of the Nordkettenbahn in the style of the Tiroler Moderne. Fritz Concert's municipal indoor swimming pool was intended to architecturally manifest the ideals of the life reform movement. A street in Innsbruck was dedicated to both architects. However, neither of them was to change Innsbruck as lastingly as Theodor Prachensky (1888 - 1970).

As an employee of the Innsbruck building authority between 1913 and 1953, he was primarily responsible for housing and infrastructure projects in the interwar period. The projects he realised are not as spectacular as the mountain stations of his brother-in-law Baumann. Prachensky's buildings, which have survived the times, often appear sober and purely functional. With the large housing estates of the 1920s and 30s, the Krieger memorial chapel at Pradl cemetery and the old labour office (today a branch of Innsbruck University behind the current AMS building), Innsbruck is home to many of Prachensky's buildings that document the contemporary history of the interwar period and the changing political and state influences that he himself was subject to as a person. However, if you look at his drawings in the Archive for Architecture at the University of Innsbruck, you realise that Prachensky was more of an artist than a technician, as his paintings prove. Many of his spectacular designs, such as the Sozialdemokratische Volkshaus in der Salurnerstraße, sein Kaiserschützendenkmal oder die Friedens- und Heldenkirche were not realised.

His biography reads like an outline of Austrian history in the 20th century. Prachensky worked as an architect and civil servant under five different state models. The Austro-Hungarian monarchy was followed by the First Republic, which was replaced by the authoritarian corporative state. In 1938, the country was annexed by Nazi Germany. The Second Republic was proclaimed at the end of the war in 1945.

In 1908, Prachensky graduated from the construction department of the Innsbruck trade school. From 1909, he worked partly together with Franz Baumann, whose sister Maria he was to marry in 1913, at the renowned architectural firm Musch & Lun in Merano, at that time also still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In his private life, 1913 was a groundbreaking year for him: Theodor and Maria got married and started the private building project of their own home Haus Prachensky at Berg Isel Weg 20 and Theodor took up his post at the Innsbruck City Council under Chief Building Officer Jakob Albert.

Instead of having to struggle through the difficult economic situation in the private sector after the war, Prachensky worked in the public sector. The important projects influenced by social democratic ideas could only be started after the first and most difficult post-war years, characterised by inflation and supply shortages. The first was the Schlachthausblock im Saggen zwischen 1922 und 1925. Es folgten mehrere Infrastrukturprojekte wie der Mandelsbergerblock, der Pembaurblock and the kindergarten and secondary school in Pembaurstraße, which were primarily intended for the socially disadvantaged and the working class affected by the war and the post-war period. The labour office designed in 1931 behind the current AMS building in Wilten was also an important innovation in the social welfare system. Since the founding of the Republic in 1918, the labour office has helped to place jobseekers with employers and curb unemployment.

His importance increased again during the years of the renewed economic crisis in the 1930s. Another turning point in Prachensky's career was the next change in Austria's form of government. Despite the shift to the right under Dollfuß, including the banning of the Social Democratic Party in 1933 and the Anschluss in 1938, he was able to remain in the civil service as a senior civil servant. His brother-in-law Franz Baumann, with whom he realised several building projects, was politically close to the right, as shown by his joining the NSDAP as early as May 1938. Together with Jakob Albert, Prachensky realised South Tyrolean housing estates under the National Socialists from 1939. Unlike several members of his family, he himself was never a member or supporter of the NSDAP.

After the Second World War, he remained active for a further eight years as Chief Planning Officer for the city of Innsbruck. In addition to his work as a construction planner and architect, Prachensky was a keen painter.

His father Josef Prachensky, who went down in Tyrolean history as one of the founders of social democracy, probably had a great influence on his work as an architect and urban planner in line with international social democratically orientated architecture.

In addition to his father's political views, the disappearance of the Habsburg monarchy and his impressions of military service in the First World War also had an influence on Prachensky. Although he said he was against the war, he volunteered for military service in 1915 as a one-year volunteer with the Tyrolean Kaiserjäger. Perhaps it was the expectations placed on him as a civil servant during the war, perhaps the general enthusiasm that prompted him to take this step, the statements and the deed are contradictory. The war memorial chapel at the Pradl cemetery and the Kaiserschützenkapelle on Tummelplatz, which he designed together with Clemens Holzmeister, as well as his unrealised designs for a Kaiserjäger monument and the Friedens- und Heldenkirche Innsbruckare probably products of Prachensky's life experience.

He died in Innsbruck at the age of 82. His sons, grandsons and great-grandsons continued his creative legacy as architects, designers, photographers and painters in various disciplines. In 2017, parts of the cross-generational work of the Prachensky family of artists were exhibited in the former brewery Adambräu mit einer Ausstellung gezeigt.