PARIS.- This exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais offers an exceptional insight into Austrian architect, artist, designer, theorist and Pritzker Prize winner Hans Hollein’s eminently artistic practice. Declaring that ‘everything is architecture,’ Hollein pioneered an expansion of the very concept of architecture. His artistic and architectural oeuvre were inextricably linked, cross-fertilising each other. This exhibition, curated by art historian Dorothea Apovnik, presents a selection of visionary architectural drawings, conceptual works and a sculptural model that reimagine spaces, structures, cities, as well as their communicative and perceptual possibilities. Coinciding with the landmark retrospective Hans Hollein. transFORMS at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais spans the 1960s, providing an intimate look into the pivotal early career of ‘the only architect whose works are kept in the art collections of both the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the only artist to have won the Pritzker’ (Prof Liane Lefaivre, architectural historian and curator, 2001).
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The 1960s were a pivotal decade in Hans Hollein’s budding career. Studying architecture between Austria and the United States throughout the 1950s, Hollein returned to Vienna in the early 1960s, whereupon he became a key figure of the avant-garde. Hollein notably collaborated with artist Walter Pichler on a group of revolutionary architectural designs presented at the trailblazing Galerie nächst St. Stephan in Vienna in 1963. Opposing modernist functionalism, Hollein proclaimed the purposelessness of architecture, advocating for a ‘pure, absolute architecture’ in his accompanying manifesto. This exhibition proved critical, resulting in the acquisition of Hollein’s drawings and models by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. As Prof Eva Branscome writes, Hollein’s ‘‘artistic’ output was already highly collectible before he was known as an architect’ and, by the end of the decade, his works had integrated major public and private collections.
The concept of architecture as a spiritual order, the relationship between man, space and nature, the derivation of building from the cultic as well as the fascination for technology, vastness and space travel became Hollein’s themes, his programme and his vision. — Dorothea Apovnik, curator
At the heart of this exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac lies Hanging urban structure with traffic junction (1962/1963), a sculptural model that was first exhibited in Hollein’s historic show at Galerie nächst St. Stephan. A futuristic metal city rendered in a vocabulary of intersecting rectilinear forms seems to hover above a concrete plinth, its cantilevered wings jutting out overpoweringly. The work crystallises Hollein’s conception of cities as ‘manifestations of architectural will,’ writes curator Dorothea Apovnik. ‘They are intended to bundle and direct urban energy. The intersection is defined as the essence of the urban.’ Hollein sketched various versions of urban structures that he called Communication Interchange, which are also on display. His drawings of imbricated structures resemble blown-up assemblages of machine components that verge on the totemic. An avid technophile, Hollein was fascinated by the ever-increasing scale and complexity of machines, which he sought to transform into architecture per se. Hollein’s technomorphic edifices shed light on his experimentation with form, as well as his underpinning conceptualisation of architecture as a fundamental ‘medium of communication’ through which human beings expand themselves not only physically but also psychically. In his own words, ‘Today’s city is less a wall and tower than a machine of communication, a manifestation of the conquest and mastery of space and the connection of all humanity.’
Also on view are Hollein’s Non-physical Environment – Architektur aus der Pille (1967) works, which encapsulate the pioneeringly conceptual nature of his practice. Asserting that ‘architects have to stop thinking in terms of building,’ he strove to dematerialise the very notion of architecture in order to enhance its perceptual possibilities. In the Non-physical Environmental Control Kit (1967) to which several of the works on view belong, Hollein harnessed the power of psychoactive drugs to foster artificial spatialities through ‘different pills which create various desired environmental situations’. As Hollein stated, ‘I invented the “architecture pill”. At that time, pharmaceuticals were developed which overcome claustrophobia or agoraphobia, which allowed rooms to appear less threatening by enlarging or reducing them perceptually. I imagined that one might even be able to produce images of architecture with pills, and I exhibited pills that I named, for example, “Hagia Sophia”, “Sydney Opera” or “Stonehenge”.’
In one of the works on display, ‘Liebe ohne Furcht’ (‘Love without fear’) is typewritten beneath an ochre pill affixed to the paper support, while in another, a list of masterpieces including Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) is inscribed beside a dotted line of red pills, suggesting that the drugs might kindle an affective or aesthetic experience. As Prof Branscome posits, Hollein saw the drug as ‘the ultimate environment in the creation of an architecture of oblivion, dream and contentment.’ Combining a compelling minimalist aesthetic with Duchampian wit and a Pop sensibility (a tiny pill even refers to ‘Wiener schnitzel with potatoes and mixed salad’), Hollein’s prescient conceptual artworks redefined architecture as fundamentally experiential.
Hollein expanded the concept of architecture in every direction. For him, there was no separation between architecture, art and society. Architecture should no longer just create buildings and cities, but design the human environment in a comprehensive sense. To the same extent that space travel, television and the beginning of computer networking changed the experience of space and time, architecture was also to become the medium of a new understanding of the world orientated towards the body’s senses.
Hollein perceived drawing not only as an architectural tool but also an artefact in itself. His remarkable artistry is exemplified by one of the earliest works presented, City (1960), in which an architectonic structure is filled with undulating penwork that seems to recede into abstraction. In numerous works on show, the line between art and architecture dissolves almost entirely. In one drawing, Hollein’s thick, inky brushwork oscillates between calligraphic art, abstract mark-making and an impression of the titular building, while in another, he overlays the outline of cities with expressionistic gestural sweeps of ink.
The works on view in the exhibition, situated at a decisive period in Hollein’s early career that established him at the forefront of the avant-garde, highlight the multifaceted nature of his practice. ‘He shifts nimbly from one identity to another’, writes Prof Lefaivre. ‘There is nothing arbitrary about this multiplicity.’ Across a diverse body of works, the exhibition reveals the extraordinary breadth of Hollein’s artistic practice, as well as his underpinning radical architectural vision.
Hans Hollein. transFORMS will be on view at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, from 5 March until 2 June 2025.
Hans Hollein (b. 1934, Vienna, d. 2014, Vienna) was an Austrian architect, designer, artist, theoretician, and teacher. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 1956, where he studied in Prof Clemens Holzmeister’s masterclass, before attending the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago in 1958–59, and completing his Master of Architecture at the College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley in 1960. During his formative time in the United States, Hollein encountered the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Buckminster Fuller, as well as Friedrich Kiesler, Rudolph M. Schindler and Richard Neutra. He also travelled extensively across the American Southwest, where he was deeply inspired by indigenous Pueblo architecture. Returning to Vienna, Hollein founded his own architectural office in 1964. His first realised project, the prominent Retti candle shop (1965), immediately garnered international critical acclaim, earning him the distinguished R. S. Reynolds Memorial Award. In the latter half of the 1960s, Hollein was editor of the Austrian avant-garde architecture magazine BAU, while also contributing to other national and international architectural journals. Teaching was an integral part of Hollein’s career: in the 1960s he was a guest professor at Washington University in St. Louis, as well as the Yale School of Architecture, New Haven, the University of California, Los Angeles and Ohio State University, Columbus. He was also a professor at the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf from 1967 to 1976, before taking up teaching positions at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where he notably headed the Department of Architecture between 1995 and 1999.
Hollein’s lauded architectural oeuvre encompasses the Retti candle shop, Vienna (1964–65); Richard Feigen Gallery, New York (1967–69); Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation, Munich (1969–72); Media Lines – Olympic Village Munich (1971–72); Abteiberg Municipal Museum, Mönchengladbach, Germany (1972–82); Austrian Travel Agency, Vienna (1976–79); Glassware and Ceramic Museum Tehran, Iran (1977–78); Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art (1982–91); Haas Haus, Vienna (1985–90); Vulcania – European Park of Volcanism, Saint-Ours-Les-Roches, France (1994–2002), among many others. He also won a competition with his design for a subterranean branch of the Guggenheim Museum in Salzburg, which never materialised, and placed second for the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Hollein received numerous awards during his lifetime, including the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1985.
Hollein’s famous statement ‘everything is architecture’ also came to encompass his work as a designer of furniture, lamps, tableware, jewellery, as well as his sculptures, installations and opulent exhibition presentations, such as Dream and Reality. Vienna 1870–1930 (1985), at the Künstlerhaus, Vienna. His inaugural exhibition MANtransFORMS (1974–76) at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York became a historical milestone in the transformation of the museum from a place of a collection display into a total environment. In 1972, he represented Austria at the Venice Biennale with the installation Work and Behavior, Life and Death, Everyday Situations.
Hollein’s works have been exhibited widely, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1967); Centre Pompidou, Paris (1987); Museum of Modern Art (20er Haus), Vienna (1987); Nationalgalerie, Berlin (1988); Yurakucho Art Forum, Tokyo (1989); Neue Galerie Graz (2012); Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach (2014); and MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna (2014). Hollein was the Director of the Sixth Architecture Biennale in Venice in 1996 and Austria’s commissioner for the Venice Art Biennale from 1978 to 1990, as well as for the Venice Biennale of Architecture from 1991 to 2000.
Hollein’s drawings, sculptures, collages, models and design objects are held in major collections, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna.
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