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Hans Hollein (1934-2014)

12 May 2014 By Charles Jencks Essays

Charles Jencks looks back at how Hans Hollein shaped the culture of Austrian architecture through his texts, exhibitions and buildings

Hans Hollein, ‘architect professor’ as he styled himself, leaves behind an impressive body of work – buildings, exhibitions and polemical texts. As a sophisticate who was positioned between East and West, and an inheritor of the Centre of Europe – that is Vienna 1900, Freud, Wittgenstein, Schiele and Otto Wagner – there was not much contemporary culture that he did not imbibe, or try out architecturally. Starting off in the late 1950s with a kind of Pop polemic – Architecture is in Exile Now, or Alles ist Architektur – he drew amazing icons of very different species.

Landform buildings, an aircraft carrier collaged into the Austrian wheatfields, blob buildings out of Frederick Kiesler and the contemporary art of the time; calligraphic architecture foreshadowing Zaha Hadid, inflatable buildings predicting Archigram, a pill to take as architecture, beating Banham to the idea, and by 1965 the Retti Candle Shop in the heart of Vienna. This shop on one level, with its phallic entrance void, is a Freudian comment on the architectural ego, but it points down into the ground not up. On another level, it was a paradox, the smallest great building of its time, selling lumps of wax, a slick-tech temple to nothingness, or The Void as Adolf Loos had it, as did so many other depressed intellectuals. Hollein, by contrast, was energetic and sensual, if occasionally mordant.

The award-winning Retti Candle Shop in Vienna with its phallic entrance void - ‘the smallest great building of its time’ - set Hollein on the global circuit

The rest of his career was a variation on many of these early themes. The Perchtoldsdorf Town Hall renovation managed what no other architect in Europe pulled off at the time, an incision into a Renaissance context which was the equal of the old building in ornamental symbolism, craftsmanship and modernist necessities such as lighting. If only others tried to achieve such a bold resolution in a historical setting, of the past, present and future, then architectural culture would have held together. The creative resolution and detail of this work showed Hollein as an artist-architect, another master of Central Europe, or Old Europe (in the earlier phrase of Marija Gimbutas, not the condescending moniker of Donald Rumsfeld). Soon thereafter the Austrian Travel Agency established Hollein as the successor of Otto Wagner. Indeed the ceiling referred directly to the precedent in Vienna, suggesting that tourism starts at home.

The consummate ironies Hollein pulled off here used stereotypes of travel to India (a solar-topee adapted from a Lutyens hat), travel to Egypt (with metallic Nash palm trees), where to buy a ticket (behind a frozen metal curtain), and where to pay for it all (behind a Rolls-Royce radiator). All of this was brought off in a much funnier way and with more consummate details than the American Postmodernists were producing at the time. By 1982, and with the State Museum finished in Mönchengladbach, he had become the European leader of postmodern wit in architecture, a position which had been confirmed by the 1980 Biennale in Venice devoted to the movement. Here his entry to the Biennale, with one theme to bring back a ‘New Street Architecture’, used the existing columns of the Corderie in a contextual way; but transformed this element. The fundamentals of architecture, as Rem Koolhaas is setting the theme for this year’s Biennale, exist always as stereotype and cliché, as well as inventive departure. Hollein showed that this single element could morph from brick to concrete to tree to skyscraper to hedge – all with similar proportion – in a smooth transformation. Cliché was robbed of its banality, and unnecessary invention of its gratuity. James Stirling, Charles Moore and Arata Isozaki among others, learned from his example.

Hollein’s State Museum in Mönchengladbac saw him become the European leader of postmodern wit

Yet there were other sides to his character and design: for instance, his tireless work as a professor, and promoter of the Austrian avant-garde. Or his occasional work as an artist-sculptor (not so successful) and curator (very effective). In these various roles he played a major part in furthering the culture of Austrian architecture, helping several others into the burgeoning field of international biennales. An aspect that struck me as different about Hollein’s position is one he probably shares with others from Vienna, such as Wolf Prix, in some ways his successor. That is, they have a commitment to the public role of the avant-garde, explaining it and justifying it to the society. In that way they go back to 1900 and the Pre-Modernists, to Art Nouveau, Jugendstil and the Secession.    

I met Hans in 1966 at a Team X meeting in Urbino, and with Kisho Kurokawa the three of us Young Turks were slightly ostracised, and thus became good friends out of necessity. The friendship lasted many years, almost 50, through our mutual families and tragedies, our agreements and minor disputes ( Alles ist nicht Architektur ).

Hans always spoke slowly and thoughtfully, with extraordinary wit in the deeper sense of the word, and a kind or professorial precision. I expect his museum work will be evermore appreciated by successive generations, and his impressive pluralism will be understood as the key lesson for architecture today.

Since 1896, The Architectural Review has scoured the globe for architecture that challenges and inspires. Buildings old and new are chosen as prisms through which arguments and broader narratives are constructed. In their fearless storytelling, independent critical voices explore the forces that shape the homes, cities and places we inhabit.

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Opening of the exhibition

Hollein Calling

Architectural dialogues.

Hans Hollein: Austrian Travel Agency, Main Office, Opernring 3-5, 1010 Vienna, 1976–1978, study for the palm trees, Archive Hans Hollein, Az W and MAK, Vienna © Architekturzentrum Wien, Collection

The exhibition explores the Hollein phenomenon from a contemporary perspective, re-evaluating his work and its relevance to the current discourse through a dialogue with a younger generation of architects.

During his lifetime Hans Hollein was an assiduous curator of his own work, and yet his persona, as a self-proclaimed 1960s avant-gardist and Austria’s only Pritzker Prize winner, often overshadowed any objective assessment of his architecture. Now, nearly a decade after his death in 2014, it is possible to look at his work with the necessary distance. Now, nearly a decade after his death in 2014, it is possible to look at his work with the necessary distance. Hollein Calling opens up new and often surprising perspectives on ostensibly familiar projects, revealing the multifaceted nature of Hollein’s oeuvre through a selection of work spanning from the small scale of exhibition installations and the Retti and Schullin stores to school buildings and museums.

The Hollein exhibits – sketches, models, prototypes, and documents, many of them on public display for the first time – are drawn from the extensive Archive Hans Hollein, Az W and MAK, which the Architekturzentrum Wien has been cataloging and preserving for several years. The groundbreaking projects by Atelier Hollein are juxtaposed with works by fifteen European practices who are shaping the architectural discourse today. Large display tables are used to create fields of association between the projects, grouping exhibits according to shared themes, methods, and interests. Overhead video projections offer a taste of Atelier Hollein’s vast image archive. The inclusion of many photographs and illustrations that are not in the Hollein canon of iconic (and frequently published) images opens up alternative lines of thought and provides new insight into unrealized concepts. These images are in turn in dialogue with large-format photographs conveying the approaches of the contemporary architectural practices, many of whom see Hollein’s expansion of the boundaries of the discipline – “everything is architecture” – as his greatest achievement and understand their own work in similar terms, as part of an emerging critical cultural production. What unites them all is the belief that we need to be talking more about architecture.

Hans Hollein in conversation with: Almannai Fischer Architekt:innen, München / baukuh, Mailand / Bovenbouw Architectuur, Antwerpen / Claudia Cavallar, Wien / Aslı Çiçek, Brüssel / Conen Sigl Architekt:innen, Zürich / doorzon interieur architecten, Gent / Expanded Design, Wien / Martin Feiersinger, Wien / David Kohn Architects, London / Kühn Malvezzi, Berlin / Lütjens Padmanabhan Architekt:innen, Zürich / Manthey Kula, Oslo / Monadnock, Rotterdam / OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen, Brüssel

Curators/Exhibition design: Lorenzo De Chiffre, Benni Eder, Theresa Krenn Graphic design: Studio Polimekanos Projekt coordination: Katrin Stingl Archive Hans Hollein, Az W and MAK, Vienna: Claudia Lingenhöl

The exhibition is accompanied by the book, Hollein Calling: Architectural Dialogues, published by Park Books and edited by Lorenzo De Chiffre, Benni Eder, Theresa Krenn, and Architekturzentrum Wien, with contributions by Mark Lee and Monika Platzer.

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Obit> Hans Hollein, 1934–2014

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Pritzker Prize –winning Austrian architect, artist, engineer, and designer, Hans Hollein , has died at the age of 80. Born in Vienna in 1934, Hollein attended the Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture in that city and graduated in 1956. Following graduation he was awarded a Harkness Fellowship , affording him the opportunity to travel to the United States. He did graduate work at the Illinois Institute of Technology and completed his masters degree in architecture at the University of California, Berkeley in 1960. During those years he met and worked with Mies van der Rohe , Frank Lloyd Wright , and Richard Neutra .

After graduate school, Hollein worked for architecture firms in the U.S. and Sweden, finally settling back in Vienna in 1965, where he completed his first solo commission, the Retti Candleshop , a small project that nonetheless won him international attention. He went on to design other significant projects, including the Richard L. Feigen Gallery in New York (1967–1969), the jeweler’s shop Schullin I and II (1972–1974, 1981–1982) and the “Section N” furniture shop (1971–1972) in Vienna, the Austrian Travel Agency in the Opernringhof (1976–1978) with its soon renowned ceiling-high brass palms as quotes of travelling, the interior design of the Museum of Glass and Ceramics in Tehran (1977–1978), and the New York branch of the Munich fashion house Ludwig Beck in the Trump Tower (1981–1983).

Hollein regarded himself as an artist and theorist who rejected all divisions between the various fields from the very start. He designed art objects, exhibition designs ( The Turks at the Gates of Vienna , 1983; Dream and Reality, Vienna 1870–1930 , 1985, both in the Künstlerhaus Wien), stage sets (such as for Arthur Schnitzler’s Seduction Comedy  at the Burgtheater), furniture, jewelry, door handles, glasses, lamps, and watches (for Alessi, Munari, a.o.). His favorite maxim was, “Everything is architecture.”

In 1972, he represented Austria at the Venice Biennale with his installation Work and Behavior, Life and Death, Everyday Situations . He was Austria’s commissioner for the Venice Art Biennale from 1978 to 1990 and commissioner of the Venice Biennale for Architecture in 1991, 1996, and 2000, as well as its director in 1996. As guest professor at numerous American universities, professor at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (1967–1976), and head of the masterclasses for industrial design (1976–1979) and architecture (1979–2002) at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna Hollein was also highly esteemed as a teacher.

Hollein also designed museums. The Abteiberg Museum in Mönchengladbach (1972–1982) set new standards in the field. The building realized for the Museum of Modern Art Frankfurt (1983–1991) is equally sensational. He also designed the spectacular, prize-winning, yet ultimately unrealized scheme for the Guggenheim Museum in Salzburg’s Mönchsberg (1989). The same was the case with the Guggenheim Museum planned for Vienna (1994–1995). Hollein’s further competition designs include his submissions for the New National Theatre of Japan (1986, second place), the Wald Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (1987–1988, second place), das Compton Verrney Opera House (1988–1989, second place), the Guangdong Museum for Arts and Nature in Guangzhou (2004), the Sheik Zyed National Museum in Abu Dhabi (2007), and the Meixi Lake International Culture and Arts Center in Changsha, China (2011).

Hollein’s entire body of work is characterized by the presence of quotations, like the outsized tobacco leaf on the facade of his tobacconist’s front near the Haas House (1991–1994), the palms in the Austrian Travel Agency office, or the often recurring columns, which earned him the “postmodern” label.

Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s archive is on view at the Austrian Cultural Forum of New York, marking her first retrospective in the U.S.

Riken Yamamoto is awarded the 2024 Pritzker Architecture Prize

Tom Pritzker of the Pritzker Architecture Prize and other benefactors named in Epstein-Maxwell court documents

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Austrian Travel Bureau / 1976-1978 / Hollein, Hans

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ARTS & CULTURE

Remembering the “eclectic gusto” of architect hans hollein.

A look into what still excites us about the Viennese designer, who died last week at 80

Jimmy Stamp

Among the sparkling storefronts, crowded kiosks, and ornate edifices of Vienna’s Kohlmarkt is a tiny shop with silver pipes bursting from a cracked granite facade leaking molten gold over its entry. The building’s jarring though well-crafted design and ostensibly decadent materials denote the wares within - high-end modern jewelry. Though it was built in 1975, the structure continues to inspire debate and discussion over the nature of its stone fragments and oozing opulence as expressions of violence or sexuality or irony or sometimes all three. And yet, despite its aggressively unique design, the Schullin jewelery shop (1975) somehow still feels firmly rooted in Vienna’s architectural traditions. This delightfully challenging little building was designed by architect Hans Hollein, a pioneer of Postmodern architecture who died last week at the age of 80.

Hollein (1934-2014) was known as a designer of “witty” buildings who valued meaning over function. Born in 1934, Hollein showed an early talent for art and went on to study architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in his native Vienna before continuing his education in the United States - first at IIT in Chicago, then at U.C. Berkeley. As a student, he created satirical drawings undermining the skyscraper (and the Chicago architectural establishment) and, a little later, challenged accepted notions of form and scale with collages depicting building-sized spark plugs and city-sized aircraft carriers in desolate landscapes that call into question the nature of both form and function. During his time in the U.S., Hollein traveled extensively throughout the country in a beat-up old Chevy, famously visiting every city named "Vienna." The purple mountain majesties and fruited plains of America taught him “what it means to make man-made structures in space,” as he said in his 1985 acceptance speech for the Pritzker Prize .  “A man-made environment [is] not only...a continuation and a transformation of something already existing, but the creation of something new, the artificial in a dialectic with nature.”

When he returned to the city of waltz, wine, and war in the early 1960s, his first professional commission was for the two-room Retti candle shop (1965). The storefront is clad in polished aluminum--“a true material of our century,” said Hollein-- and painstakingly detailed down to the hinges and product packaging  (silver, naturally). Rather than relying on flashing signage or enormous displays, the shop only offers glimpses of its wares to perk curiosity. This modest work earned the architect wide acclaim and similar commissions followed. Though small, Hollein’s storefronts illustrate a profound interest in architectural form, engagement, and provocation. What did not interest Hollein was function. "Form does not follow function,”  he wrote in 1963 :

Form does not arise out of its own accord. It is the great decision of man to make a building as a cube, a pyramid,or sphere. Today for the first time in the history of mankind, at this moment when immensely developed science and perfected technology offer the means, we are building what we want, making an architecture that is not determined by technique, but that uses technique - pure, absolute architecture.  Today, man is master over infinite space.

Hollein was not advocating for purely sculptural buildings designed on a whim, he was advocating a pure, meaningful architecture. A building must of course function but its form need not be determined by that function.

As his reputation grew, so did his buildings. Hollein became known for large museums and cultural buildings, like his Haas Haus (1990), a controversial stone and glass building that seems to be stuck in a kind of stylistic transformation and yet is strangely at home in historic central Vienna. Like his earliest work, it illustrates a reverence for detailing and an irreverence for cold functionalism. Hollein’s eclectic designs embrace both modern technological capabilities and architectural history. Rather than making obscure, specific historic references, his thoughtful and often  playful riffs  on traditional architectural symbols and elements--the column being a particular favorite-- invite a multitude of associations and, more than anything, evoke a sense of history as a shared human experience. As the 1985 Pritzker Prize jury described him, Hollein truly was " a master of the profession who with wit and eclectic gusto draws upon the traditions of the New World as readily as upon those of the Old."

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Jimmy Stamp is a writer/researcher and recovering architect who writes for Smithsonian.com as a contributing writer for design.

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RITES AND SITES: HANS HOLLEIN

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The performances of sacrificial rites and the erection or nomination of sacred places are one of the prime occupations of man. Directly obvious or camouflaged, they help to constitute life. Some civilizations today have lost their capacity e.g. for death rites. It is a sign of loss of capacity for living.

The theme of the offering has appeared in Hollein’s work from the beginning. In the cross and in blood, in the tomb and in ashes, in the table and in the ritual meal, he has identified the symbols and metaphors of design with a transformation from death to life. For this Austrian architect, in fact, living draws its energy and force from its own negation. Life is regenerated in the body’s burial ( Tomb of the Racing Driver , 1970), its dive into decay and gloom to find the light. Inertia becomes active, fragments become a continuum, only in the abyss of stasis, of interment. And it is here that Hollein solicits a play between Thanatos and Eros, transforming a cemetery into Paesaggio con architettura (Landscape with architecture, 1958), and relics of war into a sculpture, Potemkin , 1959. Such projects for underground cities as Kopenhagen , 1964, also describe the vitality of the buried, the potential in darkness.

I was greatly impressed by the relationship there between life and death or rather by the relationship to blood. Blood signifying both life and death and spilled all over. The various crucifixes and castigations (all looking very real) were covered with it. At the ruins of the ancient Indian civilizations one knew of the rites performed. Now everything was silent and empty there: a sacrificial altar still shows grooves which led the blood somewhere. Blood grooves. . .are a strange thing. Blood runs in it in a very formalized way. Because blood runs, is it alive?

A Hollein installation at the old Mönchengladbach Museum in 1970 described an archaeological excavation of ruins, with objects of Hollein’s design that seemed to have been taken from tombs and sarcophagi. Half art, half architecture, the project suggested a ritual revival of the relics of a culture, and presupposed a participation in the sacred as a collective civil rite. Lavoro e comportamento . Vita e morte (Work and behavior. Life and death), in the Austrian pavilion at the 1972 Venice Biennale, established a ceremonial route or passage between two environmental and architectural poles: one was a solemn, cold, silent interior room; the other was a marquee like construction outside—on piles, in fact, sunk into the water at the edge of a canal. In the relationship between life and death set up by the title, life was represented indoors, by instruments of everyday existence (bed, chair, table), death by a human form wrapped mummylike in blankets and set on a platform in the marquee, as if awaiting the great voyage of mortality, for which a raft floated ready, a few feet away.

Yet the Venice piece, in addressing the iconographies of life and death, also reversed them, in symbol and in material, as if for Hollein the function of architecture were to effect an exchange of roles and meanings, to confuse opposing energies. The room of the living was a homogeneous, inert network of lifeless forms. All signs of the vital and sensual were absent; the objects were cold, inanimate, cataleptic, as if they’d lost consciousness; they were made of ceramic modules, suggesting moments of life serially mass-produced and frozen. This was a sort of domestic crypt, referring to everyday situations but evoking a peaceful stillness. The pavilion of death, on the other hand—through a bright doorway and along an outdoor boardwalk from the interior space—was built over rippling water, in the organic media of wood and canvas. Its roof swelled sensually with the wind, as if to surround the body exposed on its altarlike table with movement. Water is the symbol of birth and rebirth. The raft was also of rough wood, but on it stood a chair or throne made of the same white-ceramic modules we had seen in the silent crypt of the everyday. Thus the piece proposed a cycle in which the mute goddess of death was embodied both by her own silence and immobility and by the processes of work and activity; as if all the objects of dailiness harbored reverberations of death, and were nurtured by it. “A throne. / A sacred well. / Penetrable walls. / Departure. / Everyday situations: You have a house, a room, a bed, a table, a chair. You come by boat, you leave by car. You rest, you work, you eat, you pray, you live, you die.”

For Hollein, cold forms and rigid materials become positive forces in the register of death—the only elsewhere remaining to us, offering a countervailing power of mystery to the factuality of contemporary life. This understanding of the energy of the inert explains his pleasure in marble, metal, granite, and glass, which he folds and curves, puts on display, makes ardent and alluring. It is almost as if he were trying to give these immobile materials the flow of the carnal. This impulse is apparent in the impatient fullness of the surfaces and volumes, the sense they give of an intense inner nature, in the two Schullin jewelry shops in Vienna, 1972–74 and 1981–82; in the tactile and visual richness of the Austrian town of Perchtoldsdorf’s town hall, 1975–76; in the broad, unobtrusive, but seductive outer skin of the Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach,1972–82; and in the 1981–83 Ludwig Beck shop in Trump Tower, New York (since destroyed). All these projects reveal the sensual vitality in solemn, inert materials, which Hollein has brought to blossom, exalting their smooth, voluptuous surfaces. This Austrian architect, working in the tradition of Jugendstil , has played a cunning game: dead materials are made to announce action, pleasure, a subtle eroticism.

The same ardor for materials is everywhere in Hollein’s furniture designs: his sofas, beds, wardrobes, doorways, armchairs, and tables (for Alessi, M.I.D., Cleto Munari, Poltronova, Memphis, and Franz Wittman), with their curving forms and iconic references, are static yet somehow deeply animated objects. Wood or metal becomes warm, even tender; images of radiance suggest a cult of the sun. An unnerving fertility seems to issue from the object’s dark interior substance, its hidden, almost Medusan petrification. The feeling is anticipated as early as the Freud Armchair, 1969 , where the suffering of the patient has suggested an armchair-cum-altar-cum-triclinium, the multipartite Roman couch. An esthetic shiver seems to run through this object; the mind projects a transport of images onto its soft surfaces, with a complexity that ought to have led to the creation of the Sigmund Freud museum that Hollein planned.

Further links between the design force and the voluptuousness of death appear in the long metal-tile tunic Hollein created for Kriemhild’s Revenge , an installation at the Folkwang Museum, Essen, in 1972: “A man thinks he is invulnerable because he is protected by a skin, impregnable—but one tiny imperfection and he died.” Here the hero’s death notice is an announcement of life for the object: the horror of blood is transformed into a visual elegy, in a moment of romantic exaltation. The same dramatic effect appeared in Hollein’s installation for “ Umanesimo/Disumanesimo ” (Humanism/inhumanism), an exhibition in Florence in 1980, where what seemed a river of blood ran below an enormous embankment of sandbags suggesting the trenches of wartime. Hollein’s work seems to intensify, to gather power, when it is sited in the territory between death and life. It expresses a love for the dream: moving along the intangible, aleatory boundary of mortality, the architecture becomes a possible location for the marvelous that lies sleeping in the invisible continent between here and the unknown elsewhere. The office of the Österreichisches Verkehrsbüro, the Austrian travel agency, in the Opernringhof in Vienna, 1976–78, is a dreamed, theatrical zone of suspended reality. It opens onto an indefinite territory of wonders, a geography of the imaginary that can be traversed only by abandoning oneself to the dizzy vertigo of the images embedded in the space. These solicit a fantastic journey among exotic pavilions, an oasis of palm trees, a pyramid, the flight of birds.

If every object can enter and exit from opposing worlds, does anything govern their metamorphosis? The most frequent mediator between internal and external, conscious and unconscious, birth and death, is light. Through the door of light, one can “see” the territory of the other—through the many doors leading to different environments, different experiences, at the 14th Milan Triennale (1968), or the door at the Venice Biennale. Light promises a different life, and a way out of darkness and silence. Hollein’s first building in Vienna was literally devoted to light—the Retti Candle Shop of 1964–65, a ceremonial space whose magic lies in the oscillation between distinct realities—between illumination and reflection, candlelight and electricity. Hollein’s use of light demands a response in the realm of the imagination. Passing through all the stages between the profane and the divine, light both materializes the open doorway and dissolves the hard surface. It is immaterial matter, cold but alive, and its fluidity opens views into the anonymous, inert magma of the preexisting buildings in the urban context.

Light acts as a matrix of excitement, its reflection creating dazzling interstices and fractures. The entrance for New York’s Feigen Gallery (now the Hanae Mori boutique), 1967–69, is an optical tear in the fabric of the street, an exemplar of radiant building. The same kind of rupture appears in the first Schullin store, but here the reverberation is material as well as luminous: a cracklike brass-and-steel opening in the store’s facade symbolizes light’s shattering force. The collaboration of matter and light in Hollein’s designs is integral to their sense of inner oscillation, of reverberating inner life, and of metamorphosis. Elements open up to other elements, so that metal, through the play of light, comes to represent rivers or canals of water or even molten lava, as in the rent facade of the Schullin store, or in the columns and the palmy oasis in the Österreichisches Verkehrsbüro.

Hollein also uses light to orient his architecture in the landscape, making it a focal point of the community not only symbolically but visually. At night, the Städtisches Museum Abteiberg is as magnetic as a firework display: it becomes a transparent body of luminous substance, almost like Venetian glass, with an infinite multiplicity of layered tones—a fantastic beacon luminously suffusing the city. The hill on which it stands appears to float miraculously in the air, and the architecture almost seems to be on fire, burning, consumed in some artificial flame. It is as if one were faced with a new cult of the sun—a secular, technologically informed cult, in which the tablets of the law have been replaced by the paintings and sculptures of Joseph Beuys, Claes Oldenburg, Jannis Kounellis, and Yves Klein. In the exhibition halls and passageways, light shares in a dialogue with the incision-like settings of doorways and corridors; together, interpenetrating naturally, the two elements establish the architecture as an active frame for the art. In this setting, Pop art becomes passionate, Minimal structure is cooled, the painted canvas pulsates.

The way the museum shapes one’s perception of its works of art reinforces the sense of Hollein’s work as an architecture of sacrifice. For both temple and museum have their relics, on which their value depends; each in its own way is a sanctuary for the preservation of the remains of the saints. The large halls of the Städtisches Museum Abteiberg are set in a four-leaf-clover form, the “leaves” grouped around a central intersection from which optical axes run through wide doorways into the different environments. The layout maximizes the usable exhibition space and sets the rooms on an angle rather than frontally, which activates them dynamically; also, of course, it is a cross shape, recalling the great sacrlficium . Downstairs, in the museum’s “crypt”—devoted to the historical work that underpins the present moment, from Nouveau Réalisme to Fluxus to kinetic and Op art—Hollein evokes the small underground sanctuaries of the early Church. The spaces are accessible by ladderlike stairs and catacomblike passages, and are made to seem chilly and distant in time through the use of artificial light.

The museum is most sensual in areas designed for the feast explicitly of the mind as well as of the eyes—the spaces for education and discussion. Since it is here that the discourses and dialogues of the occult sciences of art and creativity take place, the rooms’ construction seems almost initiatory. In the museum’s amphitheaters and auditoriums, which can be altered for the ritual to be performed in them (a performance, a lecture, a film), color and form are strong and definite. The values set in play are based on the allegorical figures of the circle and the column, and on rich color: if these are the qualities offered for sacrifice, they get the beautiful death that signifies successful rebirth and new life in ancient traditions from the Orient to Africa. The materials, on the other hand, suggest not so much the passage from one state to another as the timelessness of permanence. Perdurable marbles and granites imply an unshakable moment of immobility in time and space. Thus the rooms become mausoleums of materials, rooms of remembrance, niches in which are deposited a culture’s memories. These spaces suggest the shape of the ellipse, as if Hollein, like the great Baroque architects, wanted us to contemplate the double focus of existence: the paired centers of death and of life.

Other ceremonially charged images appear in Hollein’s work alongside these signs. The wedge and the axe, the thorn and the blade, indicate an insertion, a linguistic break, in the urban landscape, a cut that opens the way for a passage from one domain to another. This evocation of a cut appears explicitly in the knifelike entrance arch to the second Schullin store. The blade’s association with separation and differentiation-inherent functions of artistic creation—recalls the ancient role attributed to the goddess Athena. In the Frankfurt Museum für Moderne Kunst, 1983, its form is actually implicit in the plan of the building—a fan-shaped wedge penetrating the urban fabric. It appears again in the design for the New National Theater of Japan, 1985–86,but here the symbol is orientalized, adapted to the sign firmament of the Kabuki theater and of the culture of the samurai. A golden sheen appears throughout, the color of the hero and of power. The building is based on sequences of triangles—heraldic signs, with echoes of violence. But here triangles conjoin as well as fragment; they ornament and mark the passages through the building, and the stage is set in a kind of trophy of triangles, their points cut off, or as if transparent, to allow a view of the action. In its coloring, the auditorium is a ritual of excess, an apotheosis of gold and blood.

The Walt Disney Concert Hall, 1987–88, designed for downtown Los Angeles but as yet unbuilt, is a symphony rich in movements. Hollein’s solution, based again on interwedgings and interweavings of disparate cultural and environmental elements, shows his desire to associate architecture with music, making it leap and explode in its harmonies and contradictions. The building is a sort of kaleidoscope of spaces and of technical solutions,which are refracted into a new identity yet at the same time maintain the historical and formal properties they carry as baggage. Disorder and movement become protagonists of a perfect event: music. The atmosphere is of architectural apocalypse. The double nature of the cut appears clearly in the Haas Haus, 1985–, in Vienna. On the facade, Hollein offers a play of opposites, an astonishing display of formal and architectural duality. Square and linear patterns, cement and metal building materials, natural and artificial colors intersect and clash as they revolve around the focal tower, which is itself made up of dissociated wedges and volumes. One finally arrives at the surprise of the top floors, an exploded elsewhere, a conglomeration of movements, spaces, and unexpected planes that is a sort of open musical score of architecture.

The Volksschule Köhlergasse in Vienna, 1979–90, is an inventory of the lexical materials of architecture, a catalogue of the effects and causes of architectural movement. Form breaks up and recomposes in this multilevel cluster of buildings and spaces, a mosaic of volumes and colors that appears almost classical in the harmonic osmosis among its parts. Fragmentation and interweaving are equally integral, and the elements—wall and temple, piazza and closed shell, now central, now displaced, now linear, now circular—have the radiant energy of an autonomous cosmos. The mixture between the harmony of the architecture and the anarchic and individualistic force of the buildings appears once again in the golf club in Ebreichsdorf, Austria, 1988–89, and in the design for the future Salzburg Museum (1989–). In this latter project, Hollein will excavate an abyss in the rock, suggesting an architectural vertigo or vortex pushed to the limit. Indeed, this museum carved into Salzburg’s rocky hillside will be virtually invisible from the outside; it will be perceivable only from within. The design is for a space of enormous pathos, then, because it will swallow up the energy of the art.

With this project, Hollein veers toward the “interior” cut, as if he wanted to possess the victim (the architecture) from within, to pass through the labyrinth of its exterior matter and cut into its womb. We have arrived at a watershed of creativity that celebrates the gesture of carving into the depths of life and death. Hollein opens wounds in the urban body only to insert temples and sanctuaries, the sites where the fruits of experience are collected. He is a shaman, a fatal narrator who carves, pierces, and practices initiations. It is his joy to plant architectural daggers in the body of the city, bringing forth a fantastic and astonishing blood.

Germano Celant is a contributing editor of Artforum.

Translated from the Italian by Marguerite Shore.

All quotations of Hans Hollein are from Toshio Nakumura, ed., Hans Hollein , Tokyo: A & U Publishing Co., Ltd., 1985, p. 161.

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Hans Hollein, Inventive Architect Who Designed With Wit, Dies at 80

By Margalit Fox

• April 25, 2014

Hans Hollein, a Pritzker Prize-winning architect who breathed witty postmodernist life into everything from buildings to pianos to tea trays, died on Thursday in his native Vienna. He was 80.

Mr. Hollein died after a long illness, his daughter, Lilli Hollein, said.

Mr. Hollein’s buildings, which have been erected around the world, were, by design, beyond category, commingling Modernist and traditional aesthetics in sculptural, almost painterly ways. In 1985, he was named the seventh winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize , widely regarded as the field’s Nobel.

Where some architects are concerned largely with line, Mr. Hollein was also captivated by surface: He often combined contemporary materials like plastics and aluminum with storied ones like marble.

He adored columns, and while there are few things more classical than a column, in his hands they could take on an almost Surrealist aspect, as in his Vienna branch office of the Austrian State Travel Agency . There, as if to conjure faraway places, he turned a cluster of them into a stand of brass-sheathed palm trees.

Though Mr. Hollein was renowned for large projects — among his most notable are the Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach, Germany, and the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt — he, unlike many architects of his stature, did not disdain small ones. Over the years he took on the design of tiny boutiques, museum exhibitions, home furnishings and accessories.

His sly humor was perhaps nowhere more evident than in his deliberate distortions of scale. In a series of collages he made in the 1960s, familiar objects, gridded up until they loomed like skyscrapers, became imaginary edifices: a spark plug amid a country landscape, a Rolls-Royce grille in Lower Manhattan. Though Mr. Hollein maintained that the designs were viable, none, perhaps unsurprisingly, were ever built.

He also shrank immense objects to tabletop size, as in the streamlined silver tea set he created for Alessi, the Italian design concern, in which an aircraft carrier was reimagined as a tea tray, with the serving pieces as the craft on its deck.

Given these propensities, it was entirely in character that Mr. Hollein made his worldwide reputation in the 1960s designing a shop, barely 12 feet wide, devoted to candles.

The son of a family of mining engineers, Hans Hollein was born on March 30, 1934, in Vienna. After studying civil engineering there, he earned a diploma from Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts.

In the late 1950s, he studied architecture and urban planning at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he trained with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Mr. Hollein also traveled to Wisconsin to study with Frank Lloyd Wright and to California to study with Richard Neutra.

During this period, Mr. Hollein, enamored of the fact that at least a dozen cities and towns in the United States bear the name Vienna, visited all (or very nearly all) of them in his secondhand Chevrolet. This American odyssey, he later said, helped give him a sense of the vast scale on which architecture was possible.

Mr. Hollein earned a master’s degree in architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1960; he established his own practice in Vienna four years later.

His first commission, the Retti Candle Shop in Vienna, completed in 1966, brought him worldwide acclaim. Sleek and spare, the store was wrapped inside and out in aluminum. In its coolly elegant display cases, candles were arrayed with vertical dignity, like ranks of organ pipes in a cathedral.

For his innovative use of aluminum, Mr. Hollein won the R. S. Reynolds Memorial Award, an architecture prize presented annually by the Reynolds Metals Company. His winnings, $25,000 (over $180,000 in today’s dollars), were widely reported as exceeding the cost of designing the store.

Not all of Mr. Hollein’s work was as warmly received. In Vienna, his Haas Haus , a glass-enclosed retail and dining complex completed in 1990, has been criticized ever since for its dissonance with the city’s august Old World buildings.

In Cambridge, Mass., a proposal by Mr. Hollein for an office building in Harvard Square entailed a facade in the form of a billowing metal screen three stories high. The building, to have been set among the neighborhood’s Georgian and Regency Revival architecture, was vetoed by the Cambridge Historical Commission in 2001.

Mr. Hollein designed two small spaces in New York, both highly regarded in their day. His first, the Richard L. Feigen Gallery , at 27 East 79th Street, was completed in 1969. Originally a 19th-century townhouse, the building, once Mr. Hollein got through with it, sported an exterior skin of metal and sinuous interior fittings that recalled those of a grand steamship.

His second, a branch of the Munich department store Ludwig Beck on an upper floor of the Trump Tower, was completed in 1983. It featured, as Paul Goldberger wrote in The New York Times in 1985, “trompe l’oeil paintings of the views of Central Park that would have existed had the shop had real windows.”

Neither project is now extant.

Mr. Hollein’s other esteemed buildings include the Museum of Glass and Ceramics in Tehran and Vulcania , a conical museum of volcanology, in Saint-Ours-les-Roches, France. He also designed “ MANtransFORMS ” (1976-77), the inaugural exhibition of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, which explored the history and challenges of the art form.

His other designs include wide rectangular sunglass frames , with cutout lenses suggesting the shapes of continents, and a limited-edition instrument for Bösendorfer , the Austrian piano maker, with a red-lacquer-lined lid and fat, Deco-inflected brass legs.

Mr. Hollein’s wife, Helene, died in 1999. Besides his daughter, Lilli, he is survived by a son, Max; a sister, Anneliese Reiser; and four grandchildren.

He held guest teaching posts at Yale, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of California, Los Angeles, Ohio State University and elsewhere.

As Mr. Hollein made clear in his published writings and in his work itself, the boutiques and buildings and tea sets and textiles he designed were, to him, the most companionable of bedfellows. His position was forcibly stated in the title of a manifesto he wrote in 1968 for Bau, a Viennese architecture magazine.

The article, heavily illustrated, was a paean to form, featuring images that included a pill, a pair of scissors, a soap bubble, a wing nut, the human body, Che Guevara and a lipstick extruded from its tube.

Its title was “Alles Ist Architektur” — “Everything Is Architecture.”

A picture caption with an earlier version of this obituary misstated the year in which the photograph of Mr. Hollein was taken. It was 2009, not 2002.

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15 Projects by Hans Hollein

1985 Pritzker Prize Laureate, Hans Hollein was an Austrian artist, architect , designer, and professor. Hans Hollein was one of the key figures of the postmodern architectural era. Having graduated from the academy of fine arts Vienna in 1956, Hollein went on to pursue his master’s degree in architecture from Illinois Institute of technology in 1959 where he was mentored by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. He further moved to The University of California, Berkeley to complete his master’s program.

Hans Hollein is no stranger to the architectural realm. His impact on the architecture profession can be seen as a progression from small scale shops, to iconic museums of the world today. He achieved international fame through his museum designs, particularly the Abteiberg Museum, in Mönchengladbach, Germany. Hollein is also known for his curatorial practice, having presented his design for the Austrian Pavilion at the 1968 Milan Architecture Triennale. In 1972, he represented Austria at the Venice Biennale with his installation ‘ Work and Behaviour, Life and Death, Everyday Situations.’

His essay “Everything is Architecture” served as a manifesto for the Postmodern era.

Here are 15 projects of Hans Hollein, that exhibit his provocative design skills.

1. Retti Candle Shop

Location: Vienna, Austria Type: Retail store Year: 1965 – 1966

The shop is located in the most exclusive shopping streets, of Vienna. Retti Candle shop is one of the prime examples of how a store can create curiosity among shoppers even without neon boards and signs. What intrigues the mind of shoppers in Retti, is the great spatial differentiation from narrow passages, enclosing spaces to openings, etc. It takes the customers on a professional journey creating a sense of ‘pulsation’ of space.

This particular store has been designed with aluminum as the main material, throughout the inside and outside. All surfaces are polished and maintain the true color of aluminum to keep up the elegance and nobility of the material. The silver hue of aluminum helps in highlighting the image of the shop in advertising and packing.

2. Schullin I – Jewellery Store

Location: Vienna, Austria. Type: Retail Store Year:  1972- 1974

Hollein’s approach of design for the Schullin store blurs the differences between real value and fakery. Hollein has taken the basic shell of a 19th Century building and has superimposed a clearly differentiated layer of elements that not only serves the functional purposes but at the same time displays aesthetic luxuriousness. The exterior glow and gaudiness tease the visitors with an impression of wealth and mystery. The strongest element on the facade is the wood, brass, and bronze door frame, a triumphal arch primitive weapon, Napoleon’s hat, and Hannibal’s hatchet.

3. Museum of Glass and Ceramics

Location: Tehran, Iran Type: Museum Year: 1978

Hollein retrofitted a private residence-turned-embassy in Tehran and turned it into a luxurious showplace for art and craftsmanship that blended Eastern and Western styles, including elegant wooden staircases and stucco moldings.

4. Abteiberg Museum

Location: Mönchengladbach, Germany Type: Museum Year: 1982

This contemporary art museum designed by architect Hans Hollein seamlessly blends in with the surrounding landscape. Its angular structures settle in quite beautifully amidst the cathedral and abbey of a quaint baroque village in West Germany. The array of spaces and shapes were designed to display a sense of diversity while keeping its ‘work of art’ originality intact.

5. Rauchstrasse Apartments

Location: Berlin, Germany. Type: Social Housing Year: 1983 – 1985

Architect Hans Hollein, designed this building as part of the International Building Exhibition in Berlin in the 1980s.  The project emerged in 1980 when a group of second-generation architects gathered, to create an urban renewal in Berlin after WWII and before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The project is a private apartment building, with only the public spaces open for non- residents.

6. Haas Haus

Location: Vienna, Austria Type: Mixed Use Commercial/ Office Building Year: 1987 – 1990

Haas Haus stands as an excellent example of architectural detailing done by Architect Hans Hollein. The building is based on the principle that “modern house is built on top of medieval ruins.” Romanesque in appearance, the round, curved facade further connects this current structure to its medieval milieu. The contemporary intervention includes the addition of glass and stone onto the building façade. The reflective facade is perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this structure. Not only does it emphasize the Hass Haus’ historical surroundings, but each of the individual panels is a functional window that tilts outward to allow ventilation. This multi-use facility offers modern conveniences, without ruining the old-world feel of Stephansplatz.

7. MMK Museum of Modern Art (Frankfurt Museum Moderne Kunst)

Location: Frankfurt, Germany. Type: Museum Year: 1991

The Frankfurt Museum for Modern Art is located in the heart of the historic city of Frankfurt and is determined by its compact, triangular site. Hollein molded the museum into a three-sided space, resembling a ‘piece of cake’ . In doing so, Hollein achieved large wedge-shaped rooms at the narrow end, producing 4000 square meters (43,000 square feet) of exhibition space. A series of glass-vaulted halls permit an abundance of natural light to enter the building and illuminate the artwork. As any public building in Frankfurt, this one is also made of red sandstone and stucco.

8. Generali Media Tower

Location: Vienna, Austria Type: Office Building Year: 2000

The Generali tower was designed by Architect Hollein based on the concept of integrating the tower with the existing urban fabric. Positioned in a key location opposite the Inner City of Vienna, the Media–Tower is a landmark in a string of high–rise buildings along the Danube Canal. The sculptural shape is largely determined by this urban context. The building complex basically consists of 3 blocks:

a stone block a metal block a dynamic glass prism

9. Interbank Headquarters

Location: Lima, Peru Type: Office Building Year: 2001

Interbank Headquarters is an architectural masterpiece of Lima. This banner-shaped edifice presents a striking symbol of progress at the intersection of two highways, dominated by 480,000 cars. The new headquarter for this leading financial institution in Peru is a 90 m tall high–rise. The façade is faced with a series of horizontal white glass, with alternate ribbon windows. Tower A, is a twenty-storey building, that seems to curve forwards like a full-blown sail and is asymmetrical to the lift tower and the stairwell. To underline the “sail” effect, a network of titanium pipes has been installed on the main facade of the building to purposely make it difficult to see how many floors the building has, and creates a characteristic oblique grid. At night, beams of colored light are projected through the pipes to light up the surfaces.

10. Austrian Embassy

Location: Berlin, Germany Type: Public Buildings Year: 2001

Architect Hans Hollein adopted a flexible approach to designing the Embassy. The three-part design constitutes sections that push one form into the other from outside in. The building sections are made of different materials. The cubic blocks are in stucco and stone while the contoured superstructure is clad in copper. The Austrian Embassy houses three functions: the consular department, the embassy offices, and the ambassador’s residence.

11. Niederosterreichisches Landes Museum

Location: St. Pölten, Austria Type: Museum Year: 2002

The project was based on the program of the cultural precinct of the newly installed capital of Lower Austria. The museum is a 100-year-old institution that mirrors in its conception and structures the three major areas – art, natural science, history of the Federal State of Lower Austria. The three sectors are spatially and organisationally connected in a complex network, with a common lobby allowing access to both the exhibition hall as well as to the museum.

12. Centrum Bank

Location: Vaduz, Liechtenstein. Type: Office Buildings. Year: 2002

Architect Hollein is known for being sensitive to the topography and the context of the location. Centrum Bank masters his idea of sensitivity towards the elevations and topography of Vaduz. The bank seamlessly blends in with the surrounding yet maintains its authentic identity. Its form is derived from a rectangular body, which by slight transformations becomes a moving, freely formed, non–rectilinear image. Thus, a homogenous structure signifies that wall and roof surfaces are of the same material and have the same structure.

13. Vulcania Museum

Location: Auvergne, France Type: Museum Year: 2002

Vulcania Museum is an extraordinary example of the post-modern architectural era. This masterpiece of a building, designed by architect Hans Hollein, features a metaphorical volcano, lined in steel, dark stone, and gold, that provides a colorful symbol of geo-thermic power. The concept sketches of Hollein show reference to etchings by Gustave Doré of the descent to the center of the earth by Jules Verne and Dante’s ‘Inferno’ . Situated within extinct volcanoes on an altitude of 1000 m this complex serves to inform about, educate and experience the primeval forces of nature and the creation of our planet. Around 60 percent of the 12,500-square-metre complex is situated underground and is approached by a long ramp that leads down towards the metaphorical Volcano.

14. Sea Mio, Apartment-Towers

Location: Taipei, Taiwan Type: Apartments Year: 2007

Sea Mio Apartments in Taiwan is one of the few projects designed by Hans Hollein in Taiwan. It is a high-rise apartment tower designed in a cluster of exclusive living spaces with an interplay of recreational, sports facilities and gardening spaces. The individual towers were shaped and transformed to make them face each other. The topmost floors were completely redesigned, for rescue platforms on the roofs which were turned into a sculptural feature of metal wings and terraces tying the individual apartment buildings together.

15. Pezet 515

Location: Lima, Peru Type: Apartments Year: 2011

The apartment building tower is located in San Isidro next to the renowned golf course in the heart of modern Lima. The corner position at the intersection of Av. Pezet and Calle Clement allows for a more sculptured building. The building exposes only three facades and has the fourth façade facing towards the neighboring high rise. The apartment complex consists of ground and mezzanine floors that are reserved for recreational facilities, while the topmost floors are occupied for penthouses with outstanding views of the golf course and the sea.

Saroja Sethuraman is an architecture student. She is an avid photographer and believes that every detail is worth framing. Saroja uses writing as a tool to draw emphasis towards the needs of the ever-changing world. With an eye for detail and over the moon imagination, she aims to weave stories to connect with the world.

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Hans Hollein Architect, Austria Design Studio

Hans Hollein Architecture, Austrian Buildings, Austria Design Studio Projects, Office News

Hans Hollein Architect : Architecture

Contemporary Austrian Architects Practice – Atelier Prof. Hans Hollein

post updated 13 Apr 2021

Hans Hollein & Partner News

Hans Hollein has died aged 80

He is a past Pritzker Prize-winner

Hans Hollein Exhibition

Hans Hollein , Joanneum Museum, Graz, Austria 26 Nov – 9 Apr 2012

Curators: Peter Weibel, Günther Holler-Schuster

An ‘artist’ was sought for the opening exhibition of the Neue Galerie Graz who fits with the idea of the Universalmuseum and who has a connection with the history of the Neue Galerie Graz. As a fine artist, designer and architect, Hans Hollein is a universal artist.

Joanneum Museum Graz

Neue Galerie, Joanneumsviertel, 8010 – Graz +43-699/1780-9500 [email protected]

Recent Atelier Hans Hollein Design

Hans Hollein Architect – Key Projects

Major Hans Hollein Buildings

Schullin Jewellery shop , Vienna 1972

Hans Hollein Buildings

Key Designs, chronological:

Retti candle shop , Vienna, Austria 1964-65

Abteiburg Museum building, Mönchengladbach, Germany 1972-82

Rauchstrasse , Berlin, Germany 1983

Haas Haus , Stephansplatz, Vienna, Austria 1987-90

Frankfurt Museum Moderne Kunst , Frankfurt am Main, Germany 1987-91

Austrian Embassy building, Berlin, Germany 1996-2001

Niederösterreichisches Landesmuseum , St. Pölten, Austria 1992-2002

Centrum Bank , Valduz, Austria 1997-2002 Design with Bargetze+Partner

Vulcania – European Centre of Vulcanology , Auvergne, France 1997-2002

Albertina Museum , Innere Stadt, Vienna, Austria –

Hilton hotel building, Vienna, Austria –

Interbank Headquarters , Lima, Peru –

Office blocks , Donaukanal, Vienna, Austria –

Ganztagsschule , Vienna, Austria –

Glass and Ceramics house , Teheran, Iran –

Feigen Gallery , New York, USA –

More designs / projects by Hans Hollein Architect online soon

Location: Vienna, Austria, central Europe

Vienna Architects Practice Information

Hans Hollein Architect He was born in Vienna , Austria 1934 Hans set up his architect’s office in 1964

Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria – Diploma: 1956 Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, USA: 1959 University of California, Berkeley, USA – Masters in Architecture: 1960

More architect info online soon

Key Building

Vulcania, European Centre of Volcanology, Saint-Ours-les-Roches, nr Clermont Ferrand, Auvergne, France 1997-2001 Jury’s choice: Jean-Michel Wilmotte £70m approx. building cost

Contemporary Architects

Building Photos © Adrian Welch

Pritzker Prize architects : Winner 1985

Austrian architects

Hans Hollein Lecture, Dec 2010, LA : Alles ist Architektur (Everything is Architecture)

Hans Hollein – Further Information

Hans Hollein studied at the Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna, Masterclass for Architecture Prof. C. Holzmeister, Diploma, 1956; IIT, Chicago (1958-59) Architecture and City Planning; and at the University of California, Berkeley, College of Environmental Design, Master of Architecture (M.Arch.), 1960. He was professor for Architecture at the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf (1967 – 1976); professor for Design (1976 – 1986) and professor for Architecture (1976 – 2002) at the University of Applied Art in Vienna, where he also acted as Dean of the Architecture Department (1995 – 1999). He was guest professor at the University of California, Los Angeles; Yale University; and Ohio State University in Columbus. From 1978 – 1990, he was the Austrian Commissioner for the Venice Art Biennale and, from 1991 to 2000 the Austrian Commissioner for the Venice Architecture Biennale, which he chaired as General Director in 1996.

Among the most significant pubic buildings by Hans Hollein are the Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach, 1972-82; the Museum of Glass and Ceramics in Teheran, 1977-1978; the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt, 1982-91; the Exhibition Hall and Museum of Lower Austria in St. Pölten, Austria, 1992-2002; “Vulcania” Vulcano Museum in the Auvergne, 1994-2002; the new entrance of the Albertina Museum in Vienna, 2001-2003; the public schools at Köhlergasse, 1979-90, and Donaucity, 1993-99, both in Vienna, as well as projects for the Guggenheim Museum in Salzburg (since 1988) and the Berliner Kulturforum (1983 – 85).

Other important buildings by this Austrian architect are the Haas-Haus, 1985-90 – a building in the center of Vienna; the Banco Santander, Madrid, 1987-93; the Generali/Media Tower in Vienna, 1994-2001; the Interbank headquarters in Lima, Peru, 1996-2001; the Austrian Embassy in Berlin, 1997-2001; the Centrum Bank in Vaduz, 1997-2003; the Saturn Tower in Donaucity, Vienna, 2002-2004, as well as early influential buildings such as Retti Candle Shop in Vienna, 1965; the Richard L. Feigen Gallery in New York, 1967-69; the Jewellry Shops Schullin in Vienna, 1972 – 1974 and 1981 – 1983, and the Austrian Travel Agencies in Vienna, 1976-78.

Among current projects by Hans Hollein are high-rise buildings in Vienna, such as “Gate 2-Vectigal”, 2002- ; the Monte Laa -PORR-Towers on the Laaerberg, 2001-; Office Building “Stadtpark, 2003 – under construction since 2006 as well as office- and residential buildings in San Giovanni Valdarno, Italy, 2003, “Sea Mio” housing, 6 high-rise apartment buildings, Taipei, 2004, and “E- Ton Solar” Headquarters, Tainan, Taipei, 2005.

Hans Hollein has realized several exhibition concepts and designs, among them “MAN transFORMS” at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York (1976), “Die Türken vor Wien” (1983), and “Dream and Reality” (1985) at the Künstlerhaus and the Historische Museum der Stadt Wien, also “Sensing the Future – the Architect as Seismograph” at the Sixth Architecture Biennale in Venice, 1996. “Sculptural Architecture in Austria” was presented in 2006 at the National Museum of China in Beijing and the Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou. Hans Hollein has developed product design for numerous companies, among them, Wilhelmi, Bösendorfer, Knoll, Alessi, Wittmann, Backhausen, Hirsch, Z-Sparkasse, Cleto Munari, Schullin and Köchert.

Works by this Vienna architect practice are in significant international museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; as well as the collection of the Albertina in Vienna. Hans Hollein had several solo exhibitions as artist and/or architect. Among the most important are the exhibition at the Galerie St. Stephan (with Walter Pichler) in Vienna, 1963; the Museum of Modern Art, New York (with Walter Pichler and Raimund Abraham), 1968; the Städtischen Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach, 1970; the Austrian Pavilion at the Art Biennale in Venice. 1972; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1987; the Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts Wien, 1987; the Nationalgalerie Berlin, 1987/88; the Sezon Museum of Art, Tokyo, 1989; and the Historische Museum der Stadt Wien, 1995. Hans Hollein has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including the Documenta in Kassel in 1977 and 1987. At the 10th Architecture Biennale Venice in 2006 he presented the “Aircraft-carrier” in the Austrian Pavilion.

Hans Hollein has received numerous awards, among them, the Pritzker Architecture Prize, 1985; the Reynolds Memorial Award, 1966 and 1984; the Prize of the City of Vienna for Architecture, 1974; the Grand Austrian State Awards, 1983; the Austrian Ehrenzeichen für Wissenschaft und Kunst, 1990; the Goldenes Ehrenzeichen für Verdienste um das Land Wien, 1994; and the Grosse Verdienstkreuz des Verdienstordens der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1997. He is Officier de la Légion d’Honneur de la République Française and Commendatore dell’Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana. In 2004 Hans Hollein received the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize in Architecture, New York.

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Hans hollein, the art-minded architect, united kingdom architecture news - may 01, 2014 - 12:20   4001 views.

The Haas House in Vienna.  Getty Images

Architecture that was merely functional bored Hans Hollein, the Austrian architect who died last Thursday at the age of 80. He gloried in the archetypal, the monumental, the irreverent and the intellectual.

Hollein's was never a household name beyond his home base in Vienna, where several of his buildings are local landmarks. Nor did he attract much public attention following the heyday of postmodernism, the breakaway movement with which he is most often associated, and dismissed, by today's earnest practitioners.

But Hollein is overdue for more careful consideration. He represents an endangered species, the art-minded architect. Raimond Abraham, John Hejduk, Aldo Rossi, the London provocateurs Archigram, even the young Frank Gehry—to name but a few—were architects and academics energized by the cross-disciplinary winds that blew through the 1960s and who refused to narrow the scope of what architecture might be. By questioning modernism's verities that structure must be transparent, free from historical taint and in literal ways functional, these architects fanned an imaginative spark that set the profession on fire and invigorated generations of students whether they agreed on principle or not. "We must liberate architecture from building," Hollein said in a typical 1960s manifesto-style statement.

After studying architecture in Vienna at the Academy of Fine Arts and earning his architecture degree at the University of California, Berkeley (his thesis: "Space in Space in Space"), Hollein—who also edited magazines and curated exhibitions—opened an office in Vienna in 1964 and promptly started promoting radical schemes.

Among his widely published proposals in the 1960s were an inflatable office and the Nonphysical Environment Comfort Kit with "architecture pills" that would materialize an experience of the desired surroundings, and a makeover spray that would recast interiors at a spritz. For a 1970 exhibition in Graz, Austria, he installed an archaeological burial ground and invited artists to bury and dig up artifacts; Joseph Beuys participated. Before Hollein started building, a favorite medium was the collage. His collages of a hulking boulder-cloud skyscraper for Vienna and of a monumental Rolls-Royce grill as Wall Street office tower were widely admired—including by Claes Oldenburg, who was then working up his own ideas about monster-size everyday objects.

Hollein was not, however, a so-called Paper Architect working in visionary never-builds but a practicing designer with a flair for derring-do. A candle shop he designed in Vienna with interiors covered entirely in aluminum and mirrors and with a shiny metal facade looking something like a die-cut candlestick drew international attention and remains a pilgrimage stop for traveling architects today. Equally celebrated was the Austrian Travel Agency of 1978 with a grove of palm trees with brass fronds and the fragment of a classical column in chrome. His conceits for fusing the sci-fi and the historical made him a fellow traveler with postmodernism just as the movement was gaining momentum, and in spite of his own dismissal of the movement as too vague.

His first large-scale building, the Abteiberg Town Museum in Mönchengladbach, Germany, was controversial. Completed in 1982, the museum juxtaposed classical and seemingly jerrybuilt elements, including a marble templelike entrance pavilion, zinc-roofed sheds, and an angular sandstone tower with mirrored-glass biomorphic cutouts. Arranged in parts to address a terraced hillside, the museum combines high artifice with an intimate understanding of the natural landscape.

Hollein's Haas Haus, a shopping mall in central Vienna, is a poster work for postmodernism. On a prominent corner directly across from the Gothic spires of St. Stephen's Cathedral, Haas Haus is a bulging drum of mirrored glass skinned partially in a coffered grid of metal squares with a bulbous Ottoman-inflected tower at the corner and interiors with hurtling staircases arcing through space. Visitors love it or hate it, but the Viennese have proudly embraced Haas Haus as a landmark though it is only 24 years old.

Hollein also designed furniture with Memphis, the Italian-led group known for a sofa in the shape of big red lips, squiggly shaped bookcases, and all things primary colored and emotionally toned. His Schwarzenberg desk is made of briarwood with gold-leafed legs but seems to owe as much to the Secession movement as to Memphis. Eight years before Guggenheim Bilbao opened, the Austrian government approached Thomas Krens, then the museum's director, with the idea that the Guggenheim build a satellite museum in Salzburg with a Hans Hollein design. Though never realized, his idea for a subterranean museum buried deep beneath the Mönchsberg with a lacework of skylights and no facade, only a small entrance down the street from Mozart's birthplace, has entranced many architects with its subversive charms.

Hollein's name does not turn up much in the indexes of contemporary architecture. Currently, casual neglect seems to be the fate of several 20th-century architects with postmodernism in their past: Michael Graves is arguably more famous now for his Target tablewares than for his Tuscan-hued postmodern architecture. It's a surprise to learn that Hollein was at one time acknowledged to be a major force; in 1985, he was just the seventh architect to be awarded a Pritzker Prize, the highest architectural honor in the U.S. In their citation, jurors described Hollein as "a master of his profession—one who with wit and eclectic gusto draws upon the traditions of the New World as readily as upon those of the Old. An architect who is also an artist."

Twelve days before he died, a retrospective of his work as architect, artist, curator and writer, called "Hans Hollein: Everything Is Architecture," opened at the Abteiberg Museum, his first major building, putting on display a full array of known works and unfamiliar surprises. Hollein reveled in mining the past in order to flesh out a more exciting future. It is his turn to be the one explored.

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Museum Reinhard Ernst — Fumihiko Maki’s elegant, elusive farewell

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Edwin Heathcote

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The architect Fumihiko Maki died in June at the age of 95, just before the opening of his Reinhard Ernst Museum. It might seem curious that this Pritzker Prize-winning architect, who built the much-lauded MIT Media Lab, a New York skyscraper and was also building for the UN in Manhattan, should have his legacy defined by a building in the modest German city of Wiesbaden.

But it is also, perhaps, appropriate. For all that Maki built a career at the very centre of modern architecture, from his role in founding the Japanese movement of Metabolism in the 1960s to his exquisitely minimal Tower Four at the World Trade Center — by some distance the best new commercial building on Ground Zero — he was a modest, quiet man. He never sought to develop an immediately recognisable style or build a cult of personality. As a result, he slipped through the net, widely admired in the profession but not much known beyond it.

An elegant, pure structure that’s also somewhat slippery and difficult to pin down, the new €85mn museum, built to house one of Germany’s most illustrious personal collections, might make a perfect epitaph.

The Reinhard Ernst collection is unusual in that it concentrates entirely on postwar abstract art, mainly American, European and Japanese. Ernst — a businessman who sold his precision engineering company to focus on collecting — had worked with Maki before, having commissioned him to design a community centre in Natori, Japan. So when he came to build a new museum in his adopted hometown, he approached the architect (by now a friend) again.

The result is a striking white stone building that resembles a sculpture made from giant sugar cubes. It looks about as abstract as an architecture could be. There is no hint of the reality of construction; even the joints in the stone cladding have had stone dust rubbed into them so they seem to disappear.

As you approach, it resembles one of those enigmatic, white-walled houses you occasionally stumble upon in a Tokyo street. It seems totally autonomous, unconcerned with its architectural context — part of which is the old Wiesbaden Museum next door, a stolid block with a classical portico. But that’s deceptive, says Ernst, pointing me towards a building opposite as we walk through the space: “Look how Maki took those proportions and mirrored them here. They line up.”  

Inside, you find yourself in a world of white. The spaces are flooded with natural light — from above, from the sides, from courtyards, atria and skylights. Your eye is drawn towards a few striking works, including Tony Cragg’s seven-metre-high sculpture “Pair”, two tottering stacks of gold, and Bettina Pousttchi’s pillar-box-red “Vertical Highways — Progressions 4”, constructed from crushed, reshaped motorway crash barriers. 

At the centre of the building, a courtyard — vaguely Japanese in style and adorned with a single, delicate-looking maple tree — accommodates a chunky piece by Eduardo Chillida, a group of folded Corten steel plates and looking a little like a family of weird chairs. The piece was so heavy that the floor had to be reinforced, Ernst tells me, with apparent pride. 

If there’s a lot of circulation space — a profligacy that might not have happened in a publicly funded museum — for Ernst this is very much part of the appeal. Remarkably, the building is open only to school groups until midday each day; kids seem to relish the endless lobbies, big sculptures and the spaces in between.

While less imposing, the galleries themselves are generous, if somehow a little frictionless. The resistance is provided by the art, which is colourful and mostly wonderful. One of the world’s largest collections of Helen Frankenthaler is given only a little exposure, but even what’s on show is great. There is also Robert Motherwell, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Lee Krasner, Hans Hartung, Pierre Soulages, much more. You find an entire gallery devoted to Frank Stella’s remarkable “Moby Dick” works, frantic, swirling wall sculptures that attempt to capture the roiling sea and the mad obsession of the chase.

Reflecting Ernst’s links with Japan, also present are numerous canvases by artists including Shōzō Shimamoto, Tōkō Shinoda, Kazuo Shiraga, Atsuko Tanaka and Inoue Yūichi — epic, striking pieces all.  

Pollock and Richter might be slimly represented, and Rothko and Still absent altogether (“too expensive”, says Ernst, and fair enough), but arguably that makes the museum interesting. It doesn’t attempt a narrative of abstraction but certain ideas do emerge: the relationship between the body and physicality, engagement with materials, the line, calligraphy and so on. There is no attempt at the encyclopedic; this is unapologetically the collection of one man — and a man who clearly loves colour.

Perhaps the only thing that is missing in this elegant new building is a clear sense of the architect himself. For the museum’s opening, a show on Maki’s work has been mounted, showcasing key projects such as 4 World Trade Center, Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum (2014), the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in California (1993) and the National Museum of Modern Art Kyoto (1986). Yet it misses more interesting, idiosyncratic projects such as his early Kaze-no-Oka crematorium, an enigmatic landscape of memory and containment that makes death seem altogether uplifting and mysterious. 

That some of Maki’s best buildings were corporate — glassy, slick, shiny, effective — probably didn’t help his profile. Yet somehow his works never quite amounted to an oeuvre; even if they might be individually excellent, each appears as an effort to address a particular place, site or client.

It’s an unexpected thing, to be missing from your own monograph. Yet perhaps that’s precisely what architects should sometimes aim to do, especially in a museum — to work well, then to disappear and allow the contents to shine.

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