Architectural photographer Margherita Spiluttini has died at the age of 76. This was announced by the Christine König gallery in Vienna, where Spiluttini was under contract, on Friday evening. Spiluttini was born the daughter of a master builder in Schwarzach im Pongau, trained as a medical-technical assistant and initially worked in nuclear medicine at the Vienna General Hospital. As an autodidact, she finally turned her passion for photography into a career.
Spiluttini took photographs for renowned architects and artists such as Adolf Krischanitz, with whom she had been married since 1973, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Friedrich Achleitner, Hermann Czech, David Chipperfield and Olafur Eliasson. She was considered one of the best photo artists for architecture in Europe, was a member of the board of the Vienna Secession for many years and was awarded numerous prizes – for example the Austrian State Prize for Artistic Photography in 2016. Since 2014, an illness – Spiluttini suffered from multiple sclerosis – has prevented her from taking photographs. Spiluttini, who donated her artistic legacy to the Architekturzentrum Wien, left an archive of around 120,000 slides.