Hans Hollein

Biography

The Retti candle shop on the Kohlmarkt in Vienna covers fourteen square metres. Hollein designed it in 1965–1966, and the cramped space became a “metal box” of aluminium and mirrors. For this work he received the American Reynolds Award, so his first independent commission brought him an international prize.

He was born on 30 March 1934 in Vienna. According to his biographers, the family came from mining engineers, and his father was an electrical engineer. In 1949–1953 Hollein studied at the Federal Trade School in Vienna, then at the Academy of Fine Arts under Clemens Holzmeister, graduating in 1956. From 1958 he spent several years in the United States: first the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, then from 1959 the University of California, Berkeley, where in 1960 he took a Master of Architecture degree. There he met Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra. He drove from New York to the West Coast to experience a sense of boundless space. What affected him most was the architecture of the Pueblo peoples, and its influence can be seen years later in his buildings, where a structure turns into a landscape of paths, stairs and ramps.

Around 1960 the Viennese architectural scene began to stir. Hollein joined a circle that protested against the functionalism of postwar building; it included Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Markus Prachensky and Arnulf Rainer. Their meeting place was the Galerie nächst St. Stephan, run by the priest Otto Mauer. In 1963 it hosted the exhibition “Architecture”, which Hollein mounted with Walter Pichler: drawings and sculptures with utopian designs for compact cities, block-like masses dominating the landscape. The texts of their manifestos, among them his “Absolute Architecture”, were published in the catalogue. At the same time he worked on self-sufficient minimal spaces, studied spacecraft and space suits as perfect dwellings for survival in extreme conditions, and proposed inflatable structures such as a “mobile office”. In the mid-1960s he made the collages called “Transformations”, in which an aircraft carrier, a coffee service or a radiator grille were passed off as enormous buildings.

In 1964, after working in offices in Sweden, Germany and the United States and spending time as a visiting professor at Washington University in St. Louis, he opened his own studio in Vienna.

After Retti came commissions for boutiques and galleries: the Richard Feigen Gallery in New York (1967–1969), the Schullin jewellery shops in central Vienna (1972–1974 and 1981–1982), and the New York branch of the Munich fashion house Ludwig Beck in Trump Tower. In 1972, for the Olympic Village in Munich, he devised a system of coloured tubes that served as signposts and carried lighting, screens for projectors, floor heating and fresh air. The slogan “Everything is architecture” appeared on the cover of the Austrian magazine Bau in 1968; Hollein edited the magazine in 1965–1970. In 1972 he represented Austria at the Venice Biennale with white tiled objects; in 1975 he made the exhibition “MAN transFORMS” for the opening of the Cooper Hewitt museum in New York; and in 1979–1980 he designed the stage set at Vienna’s Burgtheater for Arthur Schnitzler’s “Comedy of Seduction”.

The Abteiberg Museum in Mönchengladbach was built in 1972–1982. The director, Johannes Cladders, gave him the commission directly after Hollein had curated the exhibition “Everything is architecture” for the museum. The visitor enters over a bridge onto a roof, beneath which the museum lies, and descends; outside, the building is assembled from terraces and brick walls as a collage of different volumes, inside the space is governed by the diagonal, and the doors are moved to the corners so that all four walls stay free for art. The opening on 23 June 1982 included a performance by Joseph Beuys. For this building Hollein received the German Architecture Prize (1983), and two years later he became the seventh architect to be awarded the Pritzker Prize.

The Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt am Main (1987–1991) stands on a triangular plot, and Frankfurters nicknamed it the “slice of cake”. Hollein won the commission by taking first prize in an open competition in 1983. The Haas-Haus on Stephansplatz in Vienna (1987–1990) was for many years considered the most controversial building in Austria’s postwar history. His design for an underground Guggenheim museum in the rock above Salzburg won the competition of 1989–1990 but was never built; the idea of an underground museum was realised in Vulcania in the Auvergne (1997–2002). Among his later works in Vienna and elsewhere are the Austrian embassy in Berlin (2001), the extension of the Albertina with its titanium canopy (2001–2003), and the cultural district and Lower Austria Provincial Museum (Niederösterreichisches Landesmuseum) in St. Pölten. In 1996 he became the first non-Italian to direct the architecture Biennale in Venice.

From 1967 Hollein taught at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and from 1974 he led a master class in industrial design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, later giving guest courses at Yale, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Ohio State University. In 2002 he retired. For Alessi and Bruno Munari he designed household objects, for Memphis furniture, in 1972 a series of spectacles for American Optical, and in 1991 for the Viennese firm Bösendorfer a brass grand piano with gold leaf on the inside of the lid. From 2010 he worked in the office Hans Hollein & Partner with Ulf Kotz and Christoph Monschein.

Hans Hollein died in Vienna on 24 April 2014. He was buried on 5 May in the Hietzing cemetery in Vienna.