✕

“Everything is architecture,” he famously declared, and just as infamously reduced it to a series of pills designed to procure spatial and sensorial experiences without going to the bother and expense of constructing a building. Conceptual artist, radical architectural theorist, and PoMo pioneer, the subversive Hans Hollein (1934–2014) is the star of the Centre Pompidou’s final architecture show before the Parisian landmark closes for a five-year-long overhaul. Titled Hans Hollein transFORMS (a play on words that today resonates rather differently than when he first coined it in the 1970s), the exhibition comes 38 years after the Pritzker Prize–winning Austrian’s self-designed Hans Hollein: Métaphores et métamorphoses, which saw him fill the Pompidou’s foyer with blue-lit plasterboard ruins.

1

2

3

Stadtgebilde über Wien (Urban Structures over Vienna), 1960, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne – Centre de création industrielle, Paris Achat, 1993 © Private Archive Hollein. Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Georges Meguerditchian/Dist. GrandPalaisRmn (1); Pneumatische Strukturen (Pneumatic Structures), Österreichische Bildhauer der Gegenwart exhibition, image courtesy of Karin Mack Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne – Centre de création industrielle, Paris Collection de la famille Hollein, don de la Clarence Westbury Foundation, 2016 © Private Archive Hollein. Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Janeth Rodriguez-Garcia/Dist. GrandPalaisRmn © Karin Mack  (2); Colonnes de la façade de la Strada Novissima, 1st Architecture Venice Biennale, La presenza del passato (The Presense of the Past), 1980, image courtesy of Architekturzentrum Wien, Collection/Archive Hans Hollein, Az W and MAK, Vienna © Private Archive Hollein. Photo © Architekturzentrum Wien, Collection/Archive Hans Hollein, Az W and MAK, Vienna 

Celebrated for his immersive approach to display design, such as the 1970 Everything is Architecture: An Exhibition on the Theme of Death—where visitors dug through sand to uncover the debris of industrial society—or the Cooper Hewitt’s 1976 MAN TransFORMS, for which he eschewed a didactic, inventory approach in favor of a “living spectacle,” Hollein never missed an opportunity to indulge his flair for showmanship. In contrast, curator Frédéric Migayrou has chosen a far more classic, low-key approach, taking us by the hand on a scholarly journey through the architect’s career, both chronologically and thematically.

As is often the case with Pompidou exhibitions, it’s more about recounting than overtly questioning, the curatorial direction of travel coming through in what is and isn’t shown. For example, if you’re particularly interested in the post-1980 Hollein, the practicing architect who constructed buildings such as Mönchengladbach’s landscape-like Museum Abteiberg (1972–82), Vienna’s funky Haas Haus (1985–90), or Auvergne’s Vulcania theme park (1994–2002), you’ll likely be disappointed, since that part of his career is relegated to a small section at the end, where a couple of models and a slide show attempt to convey the breadth of his built output. Instead, the exhibition concentrates on the radical early years of Hollein’s praxis, a choice no doubt partly motivated by Migayrou’s personal inclinations, partly by the fact that this sort of stuff is far easier to make an exhibition out of than actual buildings, and partly because the Pompidou’s holdings, acquired directly from Hollein, are strongest in this respect.

4

5

6

Hollein's Frustration Door (4), Mobile Office (5), and Work and behaviour—life and death—everyday situations with the Fleisenstuhl chair (6) on view at Centre Pompidou's Gallery 4. Photos © Bertrand Provost, Centre Pompidou

Among the highlights, in an exhibition of highlights, one might cite the photomontages from the early 1960s, such as the series Aircraft Carrier Cities—readymade settlements to be docked or buried wherever you please in the landscape—or Monument to the Victims of the Holocaust, which takes the form of a monumental railroad goods wagon blown up to giant proportions. Less caustic but just as wry, the Frustration Door, shown at the 1968 Milan Triennale, offers a multitude of handles of which only one will turn the lock. Similarly, the 1969 performance Mobile Office parodies the “utopia” of telecommunications and inflatables with Hollein setting up shop in a phallic see-through cylinder in the middle of a field. Still on the subject of phalluses, the 1965 Retti Candle Store, along with all the other well-known Viennese boutiques, is present as you would expect, but who remembers the surreal 1984 installation The Gymnastics Lesson, or the furniture he designed for Memphis, or the gilded couch and armchair with which he sought to evoke the ghost of Freud? It’s all great fun, and though one can’t help feeling that the scholarly approach sucks out some of the joy, the tongue remains firmly in the cheek. Moreover, for those of an academic bent, the serious and thorough attempt to set Hollein within the multiple movements, ideas, and spheres of influence through which he moved can only be applauded.

Hans Hollein transFORMS at Centre Pompidou, Paris, through June 2