Hans Hollein’s belief in architecture as a form of communication is seen most purely – and extravagantly – in the retail spaces he designed. Here, practical function was reinforced by an underlying symbolism and fantasy, turning architecture into both medium and message. His first, the Retti candle shop (1964-65) on Vienna’s main shopping street, had a tiny 14.8 square metre footprint, which Hollein counteracted by adding a bold sci-fi looking aluminium façade, riffing off architectural history with its echoes of Ledoux in the inverted phallus-shape of its cut-out doorway, whilst leading to a rich almost chapel-like interior. Later, in 1978, he fitted out the Austrian Travel Agency in Vienna, where brass palm trees, Austrian flags and stage curtains cast in bronze, and a ruined Roman column in chrome created an environment where customers became actors in an elaborate theatrical performance about the exoticism of travel. (ltv & rgw)

The Building Unfurls Itself

Hollein’s interest in museums was an interest in the exhibiting process. His aim was to design displays of museum collections as experimental, shifting arrangements in space rather than canonical art historical presentations. The Museum Abteiberg (1978-82) plays a pivotal role in Hollein’s oeuvre. In its heterogeneity the building is a sequence of spaces, each with its own unique character. They do not form some ideal whole but function more like a montage of contrasts. The museum architecture is neither a typologically idealised space nor a generic real space; it is a hybrid. Hollein created the conditions for artistic production and spatial installation but also for exhibition formats that expand performatively. Due to intersections designed around his “clover leaf” pattern floorplan, the building unfurls itself in the heterogenous paths of the visitors as a series of situations, alternating with, and following on urprisingly from, one another: suddenly coming into view and disappearing again like variations in a landscape.

The room progression concept that was developed for the Museum Abteiburg transforms the open corners of the rooms into pivotal points that activate the visitors in the exhibition space. Their gazes and movements interconnect the rooms and the works installed within them, replacing the traditional linearity and chronology of the exhibition situation with one of simultaneity. Hollein’s typological innovation was an expression of the shift that had taken place in the museum in the wake of the buildings of late Modernism, such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe‘s Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 1967. Like Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’ Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, also designed in the 1970s, the Museum Abteiberg was a radical new exhibition space integrated into the everyday fabric of the city rather than sitting elevated above it like a temple. Hollein designed the museum from the inside out, as a space for producing and experiencing the exhibiting process. It was conceived as an urban space in the urban context that continues and expands around it like an artificial landscape.

The Kinaesthetic Experience of Space

The exhibiting process and the visitors’ kinaesthetic experience of space stand at the heart of Hollein’s work. The Museum Abteiberg is an “accessible house”, the first Hollein built after working on the idea as a student. Back in 1958, when visiting the US for the first time, Hollein showed particular interest in the Native American pueblos in the New Mexico region, basic adobe dwellings and settlements as distinctive as they are complex. The term pueblo stands for the individual and the whole: the house is the city, the architecture is the accessible landscape; the private is related to the public, the ritualistic to the quotidian. In his designs for the central Sparkasse bank in Vienna’s Floridsdorf district and for an accessible department store in St. Louis, Hollein transformed the step-like constructions of traditional adobe buildings into models for accessible houses, which generated public space on their terraced roofs. It was with the Museum Abteiberg that Hollein was first able to realise his idea of a building as landscape and public space rolled into one; it gouges itself into the hillside and offers its own roof as urban space.

In the Volksschule Köhlergasse, realised in Vienna in 1990, Hollein applied his accessibility principles to a school building. Every classroom was given its specific shape using special ceiling formations and he added a series of semi-public spaces to function like city squares. These spaces, where interior and exterior meet, generate a city within a city that is inhabited by children. During breaks between lessons, they can enter this outside space that is also public space, and learn to occupy it. By upgrading these interstitial spaces Hollein brings the urban environment into the school and with it, the opportunity for the children to subjectively appropriate their school environment as a constellation of situations and spaces.

Everything is Architecture

Hollein addressed the influence of the environment in the broadest sense of the word in his masters thesis at Berkley in 1960, in his 1963 exhibition Architecture with Walter Pichler in the Galerie St. Stephan in Vienna, and again in his 1976 manifesto Everything is Architecture in Bau, the magazine he published. During this period he created a series of projects that tested the physical limits of spatial awareness and how potentially to overcome them: Communication Interchange (1963), as a city model of total interconnectedness;

Minimal Environment (1965) in the form of a telephone cell as total habitat; Non-Physical Environment (1967) in the form of a pill; Spray zur Umweltveränderung [Spray for Changing the Environment] (1968) and his Vorschlag für die Erweiterung der Universität Wien [Proposal for Extending the University of Vienna] (1966) in the form of an informational rather than physical network that was a more radical alternative to Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt university concept from the same year.

The Indissoluble Relationship

The concept of “mediality” – a media-saturated reality – is central to Hollein’s work and underpins each of his projects. His starting point is the indissoluble relationship of permanent mutual production into which man and environment are locked. In this process, as Hollein posited in his curatorial-architectural plans for his MANtransFORMS 1976 exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt Museum, New York, design constitutes the prototypical human activity of environmental production. At the centre stands the Body, in the force field of Space and Time Experienced, of Behaviour, Politics, Face and Tools.

In between are conjoining themes like living together, eating, clothing, tools, ritual, death, drugs, etc. Instead of valuable artefacts he presented everyday objects and their production through human activity. Using the topos of “A Piece of Cloth” Hollein showed variations of a simple object right the way through to the development of complex human achievements such as housing, protection and ritual, flags, communication media, tools, energy generation and mobility. In front of the entrance to the Cooper Hewitt National Museum, Hollein installed a tree trunk whose base was still covered in bark and whose top had been planed to a timber beam. Half-nature, half-artefact, it stood for Hollein’s entire exhibition project in which design was presented as the transformation process of man and object as well as the potential for social processes.

The Media Lines, realised in Munich in 1972, were the prototype for Hollein’s media environment-as-architecture. They formed an environmental conditioning and communication system for the Olympic Village, which could also be read as public art, architecture and guidance system. In his projects of the 1970s Hollein transformed the pipes of the Media Lines into a museum display system, most notably in the 1978 Tehran Museum of Glass and Ceramics.

The museum in Tehran reads like a catalogue of display solutions that appear as strange vitrines implanted into the historical building. Like minimal environments mounted into the fabric of the museum, the vitrines are the communicative end point of their own network and occupy selected spaces around the building, from the exterior wall to the parquet floor, functioning as a museum in a museum.

All he wanted was a big white box with neutral rooms. The opposite, in other words, of Hollein’s design, which was by then already so far into the planning process that only details could be changed.

 Yet you only have to abstract a little and the MMK starts to look like a big white box, at least from the outside. The two long sides of its isosceles triangle shape (it is known locally as “The Piece of Cake”) are huge, bare, dirty white plaster façades, onto which Hollein daubed a few architectural elements (here a window, there a bay front, here a balcony, at the bottom an arcade) in a spacious composition. It was as if he had wanted to take Brian O’Doherty’s famous white cube formula, which automatically elevates everything exhibited within it to a work of art, and test it out on the building’s exterior. As if to say: “Look at what I’m showing on these bare white exterior walls, it’s certain to spark off a dialogue with the art inside!” But even the most well-meaning critics such as Joseph Rykwert, who at the opening wrote a cover story about the MMK for domus, reserved their compliments for the building’s interior qualities.

Everything inside the MMK is white, but there’s nothing remotely neutral about it. It’s all acute angles, interior balconies, surreally shaped stairways and footpaths across dizzying drops. Hollein talked about rooms with character. There’s a nice anecdote about the huge model that he constructed at 1:50 scale to convince the doubtful director that his collection would fit perfectly into the plethora of exquisite exhibition rooms. The model was designed to be taken apart so that you could look into each room at the eye level of the museum visitor. Several dozen photographs of scaled-down art works in the collection were arranged on the walls.