The phrase “everything is architecture” echoes like a mantra through the halls of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where the impressive retrospective “Hans Hollein transForms” was recently inaugurated. The exhibition explores the career of the 1985 Pritzker Prize laureate, an eclectic figure whose work blurred the lines between radical architecture and conceptual art.

Hollein was not only an architect but also a designer, theorist, urban planner, publisher, and artist. Curated by Frédéric Migayrou, the exhibition presents a chronological journey through Hollein’s work, showcasing both his most famous projects and lesser-known yet equally significant pieces. The exhibition primarily features works from the Centre Pompidou’s own collection, including acquisitions made after Hollein’s passing in 2014. Overseeing the project is Hollein’s son, Max Hollein, the current director of The Met in New York.

Born in 1934 in Vienna, a city to which he remained deeply attached, Hans Hollein first studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts before going to the United States, where he earned a degree in architecture from Berkeley with a thesis titled “Space in Space in Space.” During his time in America, he had the opportunity to personally meet architectural masters such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe – an experience that, while formative, did not align him strictly with the modernist movement. Instead, his exposure to diverse cultural influences, including the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, sharpened his awareness of evolving information systems and the dynamics of the representation of consumer society. 

However, it was upon his return to Vienna that his originality truly began to, literally, take shape. Among his early works from the late 1950s, which were often small in scale, not strictly architectural, and demonstrated his conceptual approach, transFORMS provides a rare opportunity to examine his first ink and watercolor paintings on newsprint, as well as his celebrated collages – speculative representations of architecture that sought to transform urban reality into something both foundational and absolute. It was the collages that first brought early recognition to the originality of his thought. Arthur Drexler, head of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, acquired them after featuring them in the 1967 exhibition Architectural Fantasies, where Hollein’s work appeared alongside that of fellow Austrian architects Walter Pichler and Raimund Abraham.

Starting in 1965, Hollein began to fuel architectural debates through the pages of Bau magazine, advocating for a reevaluation of the works of Josef Hoffmann and Adolf Loos. He also began to promote the idea of architecture that could integrate psychophysical and cognitive awareness. It was in Bau that, in 1968, he famously declared “Everything is architecture.”

As the exhibition documents, this period was marked by the realization of ephemeral projects that invite us to “cease to think only in terms of buildings,” such as his inflatable office made of transparent PVC –strikingly relevant in the age of remote working and the pandemic. Simultaneously, Hollein experimented with unusual and decorative forms, such as the brushed aluminum façade of the Retti candle store in Vienna, which is showcased in transFORMS through a striking series of window maquettes, including designs for a tabac store and the Schullin jewelry store in Vienna.

After focusing on his early works, the Pompidou exhibition shifts our attention to some of Hollein’s most renowned projects, with a special emphasis on the re-presentation of his major installations. However, his most famous installation, “Strada Novissima,” created for the inaugural Architecture Biennale in 1980 and curated by Paolo Portoghesi, is not fully recreated. In this piece, Hollein reinterpreted the theme of “The Presence of the Past,” offering a historicizing take on the column; transFORMS features it only through photographs and preparatory sketches. In contrast, the exhibition offers a chance to revisit “Die Turnstunde” (The Gymnastics Lesson), an installation created in 1984 at the Mönchengladbach Museum – also a Hollein project – where mannequin-athletes clad in gold evoke the Vitruvian Man while celebrating a sensual, glorious physicality.

The exhibition also includes Hollein’s more architectural works, presented through maquettes, plans, and photographs. Among them is the above mentioned Mönchengladbach Museum, completed in 1982, the first to be clad in sheet metal and a key example of a radical break from the “white cube” principle of the museum as a container. And, of course, there’s the famous Haas Haus, perhaps Hollein’s most controversial and best-known work.

Located opposite the Stephansdom, Vienna’s historic Gothic cathedral on St. Stephen’s Square, it is considered his most emblematically postmodernist design. Postmodernism is a label and a universe that transFORMS cannot entirely detach itself from, yet it offers a broader, more multifaceted perspective on Hollein’s work. The exhibition presents his designs through a wider lens, highlighting their affinities with art, the ongoing interplay between the functional and the symbolic, and a spatial language that freely experiments with form, while resisting fixed stylistic boundaries.

Opening image: Urban structures above Vienna, 1960. Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Georges Meguerditchian/Dist. GrandPalaisRmn