This text by Bart Lootsma was originally published in the accompanying catalog of the exhibition. You can find the full catalog here.
Alles ist Architektur is the title of a manifesto published in magazine Bau by Hans Hollein in 1968. According to Hollein, the traditional definition of architecture is no longer relevant. ‘Our efforts are focused on the environment as a whole and all media that determine it. Television as well as the artificial climate, transportation and clothing, the telephone and the home.’ Architecture is not necessarily a building; technical aids can evoke an architectural experience. ‘Buildings can therefore be simulated.’
Hans Hollein, Walter Pichler, Günther Feuerstein, Oswald Oberhuber (editors), Bau 1/2 1968, Alles ist Architektur. Courtesy private Hans Hollein. Photo: Ben Nienhuis, Design Museum Den Bosch.
In his manifesto Hollein shows examples of different types of architectural experiences: everyday objects that are enlarged to gigantic proportions, visual art, pills, sprays, electronics, computer code and inflatable structures. ‘A true architecture of our time is therefore redefining itself as a medium as well as expanding its resources in that area.’
Hans Hollein, Walter Pichler, Günther Feuerstein, Oswald Oberhuber (editors), Bau 1/2 1968, Alles ist Architektur (detail). Courtesy private Hans Hollein. Photo: Ben Nienhuis, Design Museum Den Bosch.
If everything is architecture, then of course everyone is also an architect. The manifesto shows architects who eventually became famous or infamous for a completely different career: filmmaker Sergej Eisenstein and writer Max Frisch, fashion designers André Courrèges and Paco Rabanne, Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal and Nazi minister Albert Speer.
Front cover Bau, ‘Alles ist Architektur’, Heft ½, 1968. Design by Hans Hollein, courtesy Hans Hollein private archief.
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Lecture series on the Austrian avant-garde tradition
“A little world in which the big one holds its tryouts”, is how guest curator and professor Bart Lootsma describes the development of Austrian avant-garde movements in the 20th century. In this lecture series, Lootsma places the so-called ‘Radical Austria’ of the 1960s in the context of the long Austrian tradition of art and design.
Digital catalog
Visiting the exhibition, you will receive the accompanying catalog. It documents both the technical information of all exhibited works, as well as substantive texts to contextualize important makers and themes. You can find the digital version here.
So Posthuman (1): Open your eyes
Posthuman; once your eyes are opened to it you see it everywhere. But what is it? In this recurring series, curator Fredric Baas explains. In the first column, Baas focuses on the changing human body, something Austrian designers were already investigating in the 1960s.
Cultic Cities
The need for radical change manifested itself in post-war Austria in a series of megalomanic urban designs. These projects share an obsession with technology and infrastructure and a drive to create completely new ways of living together.
Actionism
Actionism is the unique Austrian brand of performance art. By means of choreographies with naked bodies, paint and blood, combined with loud music, they intoxicate the participants and the audience.
Realized Manifestoes
The designers and artists in the Austrian avant-garde were obsessed with theories of social change. Despite their manifestos often being very radical, they realised an impressive number of their projects.
Art and Revolution
The performances of the Actionists increasingly sparked scandals attracting attention of both police and media. This culminated in 1968 in the happening Kunst und Revolution, arranged by the artist Peter Weibel as part of student protests and taking place in a prominent lecture hall of Vienna University.
Schöner Wohnen
Schöner Wohnen, or ‘the destruction of the habitable coffin’ is a film made by the architecture collective Salz der Erde in 1971, in which the ideal of the tasteful-bourgeois housing magazine of the same name is mercilessly undermined.
Body and Sexuality
In the 1960s, the body became the starting point for a radical rethinking of architecture, design, fashion and art. The boundaries between those disciplines increasingly disappeared.
Perception
In the 1960s and 1970s, new media such as radio, telephone and TV changed the relationship between people and the environment. The impact on the human experience of the environment makes perception an important theme for many artists and designers during this period.
Cybernetic Cities
That cybernetics would radically influence the functioning of design, architecture and urban planning was understood in Austria at an early stage. Its consequences are speculated on in numerous projects.
Prototypes
Walter Pichler’s prototypes of furniture and appliances are perfectly executed and functional. By emphasizing certain effects of the use of everyday objects, these prototypes show their cold and disorientating impact.
Feedback Architecture
A series of experiments by Coop Himmelb(l)au investigates how human test subjects respond to intensive media experiences and how these reactions can be fed back to those media.
Mind Expanders
Haus-Rucker-Co works on the Mind Expanding Program from 1967 to 1971. The program aims to expand human consciousness and man-made environments on different levels.
Klima-Zones
The oil crisis and environmental issues have led to an international reconsideration of the technological fascinations of the avant-gardes of the 1960s. Haus-Rucker-Co, in particular, reflects in very large installations on the consequences of environmental pollution.
