In the early 1970s he was selected by curators Harald Szeeman and Rudi Fuchs to be part of an exhibition representing Austrian art with five other Austrian artists in the early 1970s (not materialized). īut this forma mentis, in turn, was invigorated and strengthened by the Zeitgeist of the late 1950s when Hans Hollein, the artist-as opposed to Hans Hollein, the architect-was exposed to the idea of crossing over and “everythingizing.” At the time it was a novelty to blur the line between art, film, video, sculpture and, of course, curating…a period when happenings, performance art, conceptual art, and installation art started to dissolve the boundary between the curator and the artist.Īrtists first took charge and they did so outside the confines of the gallery and the museum, breaking down the barriers separating art from the world at large. Just one measure of how agile he was in “crossing over” straddling media and disciplines is that, during the period 1960–76, besides being the future Pritzker Prize winning architect we all know, he was an artist who was exhibited by some of the greatest gallerists and curators of the time, among them Sidney Janis in 1963, Richard Feigen in 1964, and Johannes Cladders in 1972. His collage approach to architecture reflects this as does his collage art, collage sculptures, collage writings, and collage editing. This line is difficult to draw because of Hollein’s inherent forma mentis or “mindset.” It is difficult to draw the line between Hans Hollein’s work as a curator of architecture from his work as a curator of art and also, for that matter, from his work as an architect, artist, sculptor, designer, writer, and magazine editor- especially during this period. This is when he was one of what may be termed the architectural “everythingizers” typical of the era. His purpose, like so many cultural figures of this time, was to flaunt conventions and received truths, to liberate the architectural imagination and allow it to roam unexplored territories and associations. This period of Hollein’s was anything but postmodern, in its conservative, citationist and facadist sense. The present paper covers the first phase of that career-from his Plastic Space shown at Berkeley in 1960, to MANtransFORMS presented at the Cooper Hewitt Museum in Manhattan in 1976. Hans Hollein is perhaps most well-known for his Strada Novissima at the Venice Biennale of 1980, which was one of the architectural events that launched postmodernism, along with Arthur Drexler’s exhibition of the Beaux-Arts at the MoMA and Charles Jencks’s lecture on postmodernism in Eindhoven, both in 1976, but Hollein curated architecture throughout his long and extraordinary career. Everything is Architecture Hans Hollein as Architect and Curator