Until June 2, 2025, the Musée National d’Art Moderne presents a major retrospective on the work of Austrian architect Hans Hollein. The exhibition is curated by Frédéric Migayrou, Deputy Director of the Museum and Head of the Architecture and Design Departments, assisted by Julia Motard and Yuki Yoshikawa.
Hans Hollein, “Sketch for the façade of the Strada Novissima,” 1st International Architecture Biennale of Venice, “La presenza del passato” [The Presence of the Past], © Private Archive Hollein, Centre Pompidou
This significant retrospective offers a new perspective on the work and approach of Hans Hollein (1934-2014), both creative and critical. The exhibited projects form a rich and varied corpus, presented across all scales and on numerous mediums—architectural drawings, models, objects, graphic design, video, and installations. The exhibition unfolds in 13 thematic “stations” that trace the milestones of the architect’s career, grounded and animated by a conceptual dimension of creation.
This is not the first time the Centre Pompidou has paid tribute to Hans Hollein, a figure in the history of 20th-century architecture, considered a precursor of the radical scene of the 1960s and the postmodern movement. Since a first monograph presented in the Centre’s Forum in 1987, several waves of acquisitions (models, drawings, installations, archives…) have constituted and enriched this exceptional collection. Some large-scale installations are exhibited here for the first time since their creation, such as Work and Behaviour, Life and Death, Everyday Situations, designed for the Venice Biennale in 1972, or The Gymnastics Lesson (1984).
Alles ist Architektur, “everything is architecture”
Hans Hollein, an Austrian architect and theorist born in 1934, developed from the 1950s an extensive conception of architecture, which he envisioned as a total cultural act, going beyond mere functional response.
Trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and then in the United States (IIT in Chicago, University of California), he traveled to Mexico and, upon his return to Europe, moved in Viennese intellectual circles to defend a conceptual, symbolic, even manifesto-like architecture, with a flagship concept, Alles ist Architektur, “everything is architecture.”
Influenced by Frederick Kiesler’s Endless House, Claes Oldenburg’s plays on scale, and the enchanting power of Amerindian sacred objects, Hollein integrated multiple influences. The architect imagined sculptural projects in the form of drawings and photomontages that broke with functionalism (Überbauung Wien, 1960; Projekt für eine Stadt, 1960): the symbolic and poetic charge of their archetypal forms was meant to allow, according to him, the emergence of a new spirituality. This desire to return to an archaic monumentality was accompanied by a critical fascination with technology, whose mechanisms he wanted to dismantle and whose magical potential he sought to liberate by recycling its icons. Envisioning architecture as both a system of signs and a medium of communication, he developed an approach based on the collage and diversion of images and references. His decisive encounter with Walter Pichler in 1962 in Vienna led to the presentation of the City Communication Interchange, a technological vision of the capital. Through projects like Aircraft Carrier City in Landscape or the Monument to Victims of the Holocaust, Hollein transformed architecture into a tool of memory and reflection, whose critical charge remains relevant today.
From the 1960s onwards, this innovative thinking developed in a synthesis of the arts, focusing on the emergence of communication tools: as editor-in-chief of the magazine BAU from 1964 to 1970, Hollein highlighted the cognitive dimensions of architecture; he multiplied his interventions to study and deepen the relationships between “space and perception.” At the same time, he distinguished himself in the field of design, with projects for commercial layouts or scenography for retail stores such as the Christa Metek store (1966-1967), where he explored the interactions between commercial environment and design. From 1965 onwards, he designed exhibitions such as the Austriennale and MANtransFORMS, as well as installations such as Die Turnstunde [The Gymnastics Lesson] (1984), illustrating his ongoing reflection on form, its permanence, and transformations.
This transdisciplinary commitment, at the forefront, found a form of international consecration with the large-scale installation he created for the Strada Novissima at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 1980. Having become a figure of the postmodern movement and winner of the Pritzker Prize in 1985, Hans Hollein continued his career as a constructing architect, cultivating an ambivalent stance, oscillating between neo-avant-garde experimentation from the European radical scene (alongside Coop Himmelb(l)au, Superstudio, or Archizoom) and the choice of a critical reintegration of historical languages, continually articulating architectural project and theoretical reflection on the discipline.
Exposition Hans Hollein transFORMS
Centre Pompidou, Paris
March 5 – June 2, 2025
11 a.m. – 9 p.m., every day except Tuesdays
Camille Buzon
