Hans Hollein: Is Everything Architecture?
- Eugene Lau
- Jun 14
- 4 min read
What is architecture? Is it the towering skyscrapers or concrete blocks that fulfil a socio-environmental function? The structural substratum that enables everyday commute? Hailed as one of the founding figures of postmodernism, Hans Hollein rejected the modernist motto ‘form follows function’, believing that form does not originate by itself but by ‘the great decision of man to make a building into a cube, a pyramid or a sphere.’ Polemic in nature, Hollein viewed contemporary architecture as a spatial practice with consequences for our physical environment. In its widest sense, everything is architecture.
EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE
Austrian architect and theorist Hans Hollein (b. 1934) developed an extensive architectural vision from the 1950s, seeing it as a total cultural act beyond mere functionality. Though trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, he travelled to Mexico before returning to Europe, where he championed a conceptual, symbolic, and manifesto-driven architecture, epitomised by his flagship concept ‘Alles ist Architektur’ (Everything is Architecture) (1968).
In his manifesto, Hollein viewed architecture as an artificial transformation and determination of a man’s world who, as a self-centered individual and a part of a community, expands himself from a primitive being by means of media which were thus themselves expanded. Man creates artificial conditions, which in itself, is architecture, the process of repeating, transforming and expanding man’s physical and psychical sphere. From sheltering from weather and climate, to communicating through a walkie-talkie, these processes are accomplished by means of building to address a man’s wishes and necessities. Hollein asserted that ‘building was the essential manifestation and expression of man’, extending the concept of architecture to the point of redefining it as a cognitive process.
As an internationally active architect, Hollein introduced the notion of instant architecture, crafting an office in the form of an inflatable structure made of transparent PVC. Practical and transportable in a suitcase, the makeshift archetype encapsulates the flexibility required by him, the modern nomadic worker. He is self-employed and an immaterial labourer society, with this inflatable structure delineating the societal shift then from a Fordist model, characterised by mass production, to a post-Fordist model, characterised by flexibility and customisation. Inside, a typewriter, a telephone and sketching materials subtly underline the demands for profitability and mobility characteristic of the communication age. He also explored the notion of immateriality with projects that offer various sensory experiences, such as an aerosol can to improve the office environment, and architectural pills that create various desired environmental situations as a means to dematerialise, and thereby expand architecture into infinitely wide human perceptions.
PHYSICAL AND PSYCHICAL
‘Architecture is a spiritual endeavour, realised through building.’ Hollein saw the relationship between man, space and nature as ritualistic, and the concept of architecture to express the totality of the human experience as a spiritual order. Hollein reimagined sculptural projects in composite forms, much like the drawings and photomontages that broke with functionalism. The archetypal forms, to him, embodied a symbolic and poetic charge that brought about a sense of spirituality, reconnecting architecture with archaic monumentality.
Hollein sketches various urban constructions, which he titled Communication Interchange. A vision of a futuristic metal city is rendered in a vocabulary of intersecting rectilinear forms hovering above a concrete plinth. Its cantilevered wings and imbricated structures are very much reminiscent of industrial machine components, assembled in an almost emblematic manner. Hollein’s experimentations with technomorphic forms crystallised his conceptualisation of cities and architecture as a fundamental medium of communication where human beings expand themselves not only physically but psychically. ‘Today’s city is less a wall and tower than a machine of communication, manifestation of the conquest and mastery of space and the connection of all humanity.’
The Retti candle shop was one of Hollein’s first architectural projects. With its facade in the then-unprecedented material of polished aluminium, which gave way to a pop, theatrical interior, the project recalls Hollein’s extruded machine parts of ambiguous scale and indeterminate function. This first success was followed by the Christa Meterk clothing shop, where he constructed the front using the brand’s logo, transforming architecture into an advertising motif. Instead of functionalist rigour, Hollein’s approach favours a polysemous, eclectic architecture where classical references are placed alongside pop symbols.
While Hollein saw the role of the architect to foster and manifest the expansion of humans’ physical and psychical sphere by means of images, symbols, media and other communication systems, it could be argued that the essence of building becomes diminished into advertisers or scenographers. Is Hollein’s functional abandonment of tectonics for pure representation an abandonment of the architect’s material responsibility? It becomes interesting to think that if traditional architecture is obsolete, his ‘expansionist’ reconceptualisation of architecture could be deemed even more so: if everything is architecture, a perfume bottle or a political poster can be as architectural as a cathedral to his claim, dissolving architecture into a catch-all term. It is true that his challenging of rigid definitions offered novel, or even metaphysical, spatial experiences, but his prothetic emphasis disregarding practical functionality sparks controversy. Some believe that architecture should not just be decoded intellectually but felt viscerally.
Other References:
Comments