Friedrich Achleitner was not just a theoretician and a critic of architecture, not just a writer, nor just a pedagogue. He combined all these activities, each of which would be enough for an entire life, with the force of his creative personality. Though he separated his intense, concentrated work on architecture from the pleasure of literary creation, in his works and in his practice, those areas are not independent of one another. That is to say, in his texts about architectural topics, one often finds artistically articulated formulations.

Achleitner pursued an architectural practice for only a short time after his graduation (1953) from the Viennese Academy, where his mentor was the renowned master Clemens Holzmeister. It was a renovation of a historicist church, where his intervention consisted of a radical cleaning of the church to eliminate its decor, entirely in the spirit of modernist architecture. In 1958, he joined a group of young, radical writers —the Wiener Gruppe— inspired by Dadaism and Surrealism, and participated in their actions within the literary cabarets of 1958 and 1959. Achleitner also dealt with concrete and dialectal poetry and was experimenting with the materiality and sonority of language. That poetry seems like a musical notation for reading, and was best read by the author himself in literary evenings. Between 2003 and 2015, he published six books of prose, in which he often critically reviews life phenomena, the use of language, and the conduct of his fellow citizens. These are sketch stories, always written with a visible enjoyment of word play, with gentle irony and awareness of the ambivalence of the human condition.