Hans Hollein

Haas Haus, at Vienna, Austria, 1987 to 1990.

      map of works

(b. Vienna, Austria 1934)

Hans Hollein was born in Vienna in 1934. He studied at the Academy of Graphic Arts in Vienna, the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and the University of California at Berkeley where he received his Masters in Architecture. After working in several architecture offices in Australia, South America, Sweden and Germany he returned to Vienna and established a private practice in 1964.

Hollein derived an architectural vocabulary based on an intimate knowledge of the Vienna's culture. Although his studies in America affected his development, Hollein's work relied heavily on Viennese historicism and the Secession movement.

In the early 1960s, Hollein actively criticized Functionalism through speeches, writings, drawings and projects. He used the theory that "everything is architecture" as a means of discounting the strict formalism of Functionalism. Ironically, Hollein's work often appears as a form of Super-Functionalism despite his overt criticism of the functional style.

Since the Baroque era, possibly because of the Hapsburg's firm suppression of literature, the ambivalence of music or architecture have been used for narrative tales. Assembly, collage, and the alteration of old meanings through new relationships are cultivated in media other than just language. Hans Hollein seems not only to personify this tradition but to intentionally exaggerate it.

References
Muriel Emmanuel. Contemporary Architects. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980. ISBN 0-312-16635-4. NA 680-C625. p369.

Details

Recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, 1985.

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Search the RIBA architecture library catalog for more references on Hans Hollein
 

Hans Hollein Pritzker Prize — Several pages of good background information, at the Pritzker Prize site.

Hans Hollein at Archiplanet — Find, add, and edit info at the all-buildings collaboration

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