Hans Hollein at Centre Pompidou in Paris
Until 2 June 2025, the Centre Pompidou in Paris presents Hans Hollein, transFORMS, a monographic exhibition devoted to the architect known for his mantra ‘Everything is architecture’. An architect who could have remained an artist of his time, as shown by the first part of this Paris retrospective, had he not succumbed to the advances of the post-modernism that led him to win the Pritzker Prize in 1985, rewarding a ‘master of his profession’.
Anastasia de Villepin
Hans Hollein, Stadtgebilde über Wien [Structures urbaines au-dessus de Vienne], 1960. Photomontage on original card, 13.8 x 32.7 cm
‘This exhibition is the second part of a retrospective that began in 1987,’ explains Frédéric Migayrou, deputy director of the Centre Pompidou and curator of the exhibition, in his introduction. ‘It allows us to show some 170 works by the artist held in our collections, most of which were acquired in 2016’. In the post-war Vienna in which the young Hollein, born in 1934, grew up, all that remained of architecture were the concrete towers built under the German occupation. Hollein studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, then graduated from the Institute of Technology in Chicago and obtained a master’s degree in architecture from the University of California at Berkeley. There, he met Richard Neutra and Frank Lloyd Wright, before returning in 1964 in Vienna to found his own office.
Hollein’s first creative steps were artistic, as shown by the Architektur exhibition he designed with sculptor Walter Pichler in 1963, featured at the very entrance of the Centre Pompidou retrospective. At the same time, the collages he produced were gaining recognition from galleries and avant-garde artists – one of these collages was actually bought by American sculptor Claes Oldenburg, who shared with Hans Hollein a taste for modified scale to highlight the absurdity of forms and their functions. ‘For a long time, he was the only architect to feature in contemporary art exhibitions,’ points out Migayrou.
Left: Hans Hollein, magazine Bau: Schrift für Architektur und Städtebau, no. 1-2: Alles ist Architektur [Everything is Architecture], 1968; right, view of the installation Pneumatische Strukturen [Pneumatic Structures]. Three monumental inflatables, Kapfenberg (Austria), 1967. Photographic print on paper, 23.5 × 18 cm
These transdisciplinary aspirations would not leave him for long: for Hollein, a landscape modified by agriculture is architecture. The photographs he took of vast plains are understood as ‘non-architectural’ subjects – now exhibited as works of art. Sometimes pill-shaped (Architekturpille, 1967), sometimes inflatable (his ‘möbilen Büro’ of 1969), this architecture, though called ‘paper architecture’, is directly echoing the European ‘radical architecture’, which develop theory, collage and performance as other forms of expression of the architectural experience. In 1968, it was the reproductions of his works Svobodair and Österreich Brille (Austrian Glasses), showing the possibility of an ‘architecture-experience’ that frame the contents page of No.139 of L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, devoted to trends in architecture.
L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, September 1968
In 1972, Hans Hollein represented Austria at the Venice Biennale — it wasn’t until 1980 that architecture also had a ‘proper’ biennale in Venice — and presented the installation Werk und Verhalten, Leben und Tod. Alltägliche Situationen. [Situations of Everyday Life], a dreamlike plunge into the rituals of existence and death. Set up on the banks of the Rio dei Giardini, and reproduced identically in the exhibition rooms in Paris, a shaded platform on stilts shelters a stretcher on which rests a figure wrapped in fabric: here, the unexpected lyricism of this ‘primitive hut’ disrupt the humorous discourse to which Hans Hollein has accustomed us since his collages and plastic metamorphosis featured at the beginning of the exhibition.
View of the installation Werk und Verhalten, Leben und Tod. Alltägliche Situationen [Work and Behaviour, Life and Death, Everyday Situations], originally shown at the Venice Biennale in 1972 and recreated at the Centre Pompidou, 2025.
Alongside his artworks, which could have made him one of the leading artists of his time, Hollein has undertaken a number of increasingly ambitious architectural projects. In Germany, in Mönchengladbach, the architecture is no longer a spray can, but a 3,500-sq.m museum, the Museum Abteiberg, opened in 1982. However, while the range rises, the pace remains steady, as Julia Motard and Yûki Yoshikawa, curators and associate curators of the exhibition, point out: ‘For Hans Hollein, architecture should be seen as an interaction between the symbolic and the functional. [His spatial language] is based on sculptural forms and metaphors’. Hence the colonnade for La Strada Novissima, at the very first Venice Architecture Biennale in 1980; the Haas Haus’ façades (1990), shimmering with Viennese volutes; and the truncated cones, in France (Vulcania, Saint-Ourse-les-Roches, 2002) or in Taiwan (E-Ton Solar headquarters, Tainan, 2008).
Conceptual art, avant-garde magazines, radical architecture, pop shops, Memphis design and postmodern superimpositions… Hollein is a perfect incarnation of the second half of the 20th century, as pictured in the brief but pertinent Parisian exhibition. In 1985, while receiving the prize that would make him the first Austrian architect to be awarded a Pritzker, Hollein stated: ‘I have always considered architecture as an art. To me architecture is not primarily the solution of a problem, but the making of a statement. Within the two poles of architectural activity, architecture as ritual and architecture as a means of preservation of body-temperature, my search is for the absolute, as well as for the needs and constraints, which also generate form.’ If every is architecture, every part of Hollein was architecture.
Hans Hollein. transFORMS Untile 2 June 2025 Centre national d’art et de culture Georges-Pompidou Place Georges-Pompidou, 75004 Paris
