Hans Hollein and Postmodernism

Art and Architecture in Austria, 1958-1985

Eva Branscome

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317123842
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Architettura generale

Set within the broader context of post-war Austria and the re-education initiatives set up by the Allied forces, particularly the US, this book investigates the art and architecture scene in Vienna to ask how this can inform our broader understanding of architectural Postmodernism.

The book focuses on the outputs of the Austrian artist and architect, Hans Hollein, and on his appropriation as a Postmodernist figure. In Vienna, the circles of radical art and architecture were not distinct, and Hollein's claim that 'Everything is Architecture' was symptomatic of this intermixing of creative practices. Austria's proximity to the so-called 'Iron Curtain' and its post-war history of four-power occupation gave a heightened sense of menace that emerged strongly in Viennese art in the Cold War era. Seen as a collective entity, Hans Hollein's works across architecture, art, writing, exhibition design and publishing clearly require a more diverse, complex and culturally nuanced account of architectural Postmodernism than that offered by critics at the time.

Across the five chapters, Hollein's outputs are viewed not as individual projects, but as symptomatic of Austria's attempts to come to terms with its Nazi past and to establish a post-war identity.

Chapter 1
The project Postmodernism and its midwives

Paolo Portoghesi and the architectural Biennale in Venice 1980

The Viennese architect Hans Hollein sprang into the public eye as the fully fledged poster child for architectural Postmodernism during the Biennale 1980 in Venice. At that year’s art extravaganza – the first architectural Biennale and the one that launched architectural Postmodernism as a style – Hollein’s façade as part of the Strada Novissima was critically acclaimed as the most successful in illustrating the ideas of this exhibition. But why and how did he become one of the main figures around which architectural Postmodernism converged? Architectural Postmodernism was very much a mediated construction, not something that grew naturally over generations. There were key vehicles and key figures involved in its installation as a recognised and publicly discussed phenomenon. It is important to point out here that Hans Hollein, while always actively embracing its media, never set out to be part of this architectural movement. Although he appears to have been happy enough when his work was recreated at the recent and major exhibition Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990,¹ where his Strada Novissima façade featured as a full-scale centrepiece and gateway, Hollein still declared with some forcefulness: ‘I am not a Postmodernist!’²

In this chapter my investigation will centre on Hollein’s appropriation by the critics and promoters. This was not a coincidence, and there was no one event or location that identified the Austrian with this style. His positioning as the representative Postmodern architect happened from three very different directions – the Anglo-American, the Italian and the German. Three key figures were involved – Charles Jencks, Paolo Portoghesi and Heinrich Klotz. These three men very definitely had their own agendas and their different interpretations of Postmodernism. While they did not necessarily see eye to eye in terms of what architectural Postmodernism was all about, they did agree that Hollein’s work was central. Each of the three media – the publication, the exhibition and the museum – became the midwives to the birth of Hans Hollein as a Postmodernist.

The architectural Biennale in 1980 proved to be decisive in disseminating architectural Postmodernism beyond the boundaries of niche groups of experts – be they practicing architects or writers. This exhibition reached a phenomenal audience of approximately 40,000 ticketed visitors.³ It turned architecture into popular culture. It is not a surprise therefore that much of the general understanding of what constituted architectural Postmodernism was principally informed by this event, just because it had so successfully managed to locate itself within the mass consciousness. Prior to this exhibition Charles Jencks’s definition of architectural Postmodernism was that of a pluralist style based on the idea of communication, contextualism and irony – conceptually difficult to grasp because it was inherently contradictory. Style is usually understood as a conformity of features and ornamentation. Pluralism is exactly the opposite; it accepts and invites deviation from the norm as well as diversity. But this was also a fundamental problem. While the theme of the Biennale had been architectural Postmodernism, its title was The Presence of the Past. By so blatantly allowing historicism back into the architectural discussion from which it had been banished since the Bauhaus had moved to the US,⁴ architectural Postmodernism became increasingly associated with the return of classical features. Hans Hollein had been among the 20 architects selected to display his work in the main hall. By participating in this show his work became implicated in the emerging definition of architectural changes – as it had been previously through the media of Charles Jencks’s ‘evolvotome’ The Language of Post-Modern Architecture and Architectural Design magazine.

While this was the first architectural Biennale, it was not the first time the Viennese artist/architect had been exhibited at this venue. Hans Hollein had been going to the Biennale regularly since he was an architectural student.⁵ By 1972 he was able to exhibit his own work as an artist within the Austrian Pavilion, in an installation titled Work and Behaviour – Life and Death – Everyday Situations. Later from 1978 to 1990 he became the commissioner of the Austrian Pavilion. His appointment to this position was as a result of a vociferous objection to the selection of Austria’s contribution to the art Biennale by Lee Springschitz:

This is a slightly complicated story, but I was appointed to be the curator, because I criticized the Art Biennale and the artists who Austria sent to the Biennale. [At a dinner] after an opening there was our culture minister [Fred Sinowatz] as well as the curator of the Austrian Pavilion whom I attacked at the time and I said there should have been Arnulf Rainer and the curator said: “Well, Arnulf Rainer belongs to the graphic Biennale in Ljubljana.” Ja, that was really stupid, but it showed their stupidity and the minister said: “If you can do it better, than you can do it better.” I mean, he was maybe not completely serious about that, but I immediately said: “Well, I accept this challenge.⁶

Over the next years and through this appointment, Hans Hollein was able to contribute to the international exposure of Austria’s avant-garde artists, whom he knew well through his involvement with the Galerie St. Stephan in Vienna. In the first year in 1978 unsurprisingly he exhibited the work of Arnulf Rainer. The minister was so pleased that Hollein was reappointed. In 1980 he made it possible for Valie Export and Maria Lassnig to show their work; then in 1982, Walter Pichler. In 1984 he exhibited Attersee. That was the same Biennale at which the Austrian pavilion by Josef Hoffmann celebrated its 50th year with a restoration by Hans Hollein. He continued to be involved on various levels over the years and by 1996 became the first non-Italian director of the Biennale. On his selection to exhibit his work as an architect for the 1980 Biennale, Hans Hollein stated that he did not know why he specifically had been asked,⁷ and it is true that until then his exposure at the bi-yearly art festival had been as an artist and curator but not as an architect.

The Architectural Biennale 1980 was, as noted, the first architectural biennale; although architecture had been shown before, it was the first such festival in which architecture was separated from the art exhibition. This seminal exhibition needs to be understood as part of an ongoing development.⁸ There was a precursor to this event when Vittorio Gregotti, himself an architect rather than the usual art historian, was asked to curate the Art Biennale for the year 1975 and insisted on the inclusion of a small architectural exhibition. The Biennale had been shut down due to protest actions in 1968, the unrest caused by artists who had accused the event of ignoring the many seismic changes within society. Gregotti conceived the small but separate architectural section as a socially and intellectually inclusive project. It not only involved architects and artists but also urbanists and builders and even residents of Venice. The idea had been to change the institution by raising the profile of architecture alongside art and by doing this, show more social commitment.⁹

By the late 1970s this architectural section was considered controversial. In the introduction to the exhibition catalogue of the Biennale in 1980, Giuseppe Galasso, a historian and president of the Biennale from 1978 to 1983, explained the need for divorcing the two sectors:

The experience showed that including Architecture among the other Visual Arts created considerable problems of balance and involvement in the set themes.

In such a context, tradition rather tended to undervalue the facts of architecture and put them on a lower level. All the same, and this is a paradox perhaps worth more than a fleeting mention, in the most recent Biennales it was more the other artists or operators in the field of the arts who complained of encroachment by the architects, something that even seemed sanctioned in the tasks which the architects, obviously, were allotted – staging shows and exhibitions.

Living together had, in other words, become difficult. …

They [the fine arts] had been joined to it [architecture] by ancient aesthetic and rhetorical tradition. While the work of art was progressively being transformed into an event, gradually but on a very large scale losing its features as a manufactured article (sculpture, painting, etc.), the architectural product, energetically removed from all monumentalist concepts, appeared ever more to be part of a much more complex subject which on the one hand flowed into the whole, vast subject formed by town planning, land management, “landscape architecture” and so on, while on the other hand it ran into the problem of “material culture”, the social and individual use of time and resources, etc. All this was naturally felt beyond the Biennale …

All the same, the Biennale became aware of this along with another particularly important element concerning the nature and installation of the cultural events. Here, too, the element of paradox was not missing. The old method of putting the Visual Arts on show, with exhibitions, reviews, or whatever other names were dreamt up, collapsed and entered a deep and as yet unsolved crisis (not easy for the Biennale to solve, nor for anyone else). Meanwhile, the exhibitory methods of Architecture, no matter how much they have been or will be revised, demonstrated a remarkable sensitivity for new articulation and constant vitality, which was another reason for the uneasy alliance between Architecture and … the rest.¹⁰

At a time when everything could be architecture, when architecture had not only learned its own lessons from performance art and action environments, but was progressively embracing its intrinsic art forms such as drawings and models, it had become difficult for the visual arts to reconcile the increasingly similar modes of display of architecture and non-representational art. Possibly the threat from architecture was the fact that content had not been abandoned completely – architecture was still about objects – and that its social commitment was implicit. While presentations and exhibitions had always been part of architecture, the display of contemporary art had become increasingly difficult.

The appointed director, Paolo Portoghesi, had several areas he wanted the Biennale in 1980 to address: First, the curatorial challenge of an architectural exhibition that would also be an inclusive, non-elitist event accessible to the general public and second, the reintroduction of the historic context as a generally acceptable part of architecture and its discourse and adding to this the complexity of the urban context, its streets and piazzas as social realms and cultural repositories. A third objective was to expose the Italian architectural scene to new developments in Europe and the US.

For Paolo Portoghesi, history and architecture were inseparable, and he considered the study of history a part of architectural practice: the historian was an architect, and architectural history was architecture.¹¹ By the time he was asked to direct the first architectural Biennale, he had written many books on architecture, as well as having practiced as an architect and teacher. Paolo Portoghesi’s primary concern was that Modernism had written history out of its own historiography. While the word ‘modern’ had always been understood as part of a process of perpetual change, it had hardened to something immutable complete with ‘its own moral code and almost biblical prohibitions’¹² in the twentieth century when it became identified with style.¹³ Mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The project Postmodernism and its midwives
• 2 Setting the scene
• 3 On an American stage
• 4 The Austrian avant-garde in Vienna: Monsignore Mauer and the Galerie St. Stephan
• 5 Bau or to build a magazine: Hollein’s architecture as media
• Conclusion
• Index