"The context is not defined here by proportion, material or color; in this project the context is the relation between street and roof. Hence the inverted streak of lightning, which represents the line of energy that arches over the roof and tears it open....The task is easy to describe: 400 square meters of roof space were to be converted into an office, the main element being a central conference-room. One of our strategies was to plan and build the two side of the building. The two galleries—like balconies—one facing in, the other out, and separated by a glass wall and glass door—exemplify the concept of interplay between interior and exterior. A flight of stairs leads from the foyer up to the roof a garden, which also gives access to the conference-room."

— from Peter Noever, ed. Architecture in Transition: Between Deconstruction and New Modernism. p23-24.

The Creator's Words

"You can judge just how bad the '70's were by looking at the period's super-tense architecture. Opinion polls and a complacent democracy live behind Biedermeier facades. But we don't want to build Biedermeier. Not now, and at no other time. We are tired of seeing Palladio and other historical masks, because we don't want architecture to exclude everything that is disquieting. We want architecture to have more; we want architecture that bleeds, that exhausts, that revolves, and even breaks; architecture that burns, that stings, that rips, that tears under stress. Architecture should be cavernous, fiery, smooth, hard, angular, alluring, repelling, wet, dry, throbbing. Alive or dead. Cold: then cold as a block of ice. Hot: then hot as a blazing wing."

(Architecture Must Blaze, 1980)

— Coop Himmelblau. from Peter Cook and Rosie Llewellyn-Jones. New Spirit in Architecture. p36-38.