Description

“Architecture, to Hollein, was a medium of communication. By means of different media, the human being—a self-centered individual who is also part of the community—has expanded himself continually, while at the same time continually expanding these media […]. To understand Hollein, we further have to realize that he was a ‘doer’ who seems to have dominated the Austrian art and architecture scene for decades.”—Christoph Thun-Hohenstein

Published on the occasion of Hans Hollein’s exhibitions at Museum Abteiberg (Mönchengladbach, Germany) and MAK (Vienna) in 2014, this book collects a series of photographs by Aglaia Konrad and Armin Linke showing Hollein’s most famous masterpieces, as well as a series of installation views from the two exhibitions and a collection of critical texts. Providing a considerable material for opening up new perspectives on the Austrian architect’s oeuvre and demonstrating the survival of utopian architectural design, this book highlights Hollein’s avant-gardist point of view, and reveal most of the formal and substantive ideas included in the architect’s practice, still remarkably rooted in the present. “Our future nostalgia” is here, while humans and the environment end to be—as in Hollein’s belief— something that reciprocally produces each other, in an indissoluble relationship.