Coop Himmelb (l) au

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Coop Himmelb (l) au

logo
legal form ZT GmbH
founding 1968
Seat Vienna , Austria
management
  • Harald Krieger
  • Karolin Schmidbaur
Branch architecture
Website www.coop-himmelblau.at

Coop Himmelb (l) au is an internationally active, avant-garde architecture firm .

history

Coop Himmelb (l) au was founded in 1968 by Wolf D. Prix , Helmut Swiczinsky and Michael Holzer in Vienna and has been active in the fields of architecture, urban planning, design and art ever since. In 1988 another studio was opened in Los Angeles . Further project offices are located in Frankfurt am Main and Paris . Coop Himmelb (l) au currently employs 150 people from 19 nations.

The Coop Himmelb (l) au architecture studio is run by Wolf D. Prix, Harald Krieger, Karolin Schmidbaur and project partners. The project partners include Michael Beckert, Luzie Giencke, Andrea Graser, Helmut Holleis, Markus Pillhofer, Markus Prossnigg, Wolfgang Reicht, Frank Stepper and Michael Volk. After Michael Holzer retired in 1971 and Helmut Swiczinsky's retirement from operational business in 2001, followed by his final retirement in 2006, Wolf D. Prix heads the studio as Design Principal / CEO. From 2000 to 2011 Wolfdieter Dreibholz was managing director and partner of Coop Himmelb (l) au. Harald Krieger became partner and managing director of COOP HIMMELB (L) AU Europe GmbH in Frankfurt am Main in 2003. In 2011 he also took over the financial management of the studio as CFO. Karolin Schmidbaur became a partner in the office in 1996 and is currently the design and managing partner of Coop Himmelb (l) au Vienna (since 2009) and head of the studio in Los Angeles (since 2003).

Work of the group were in 1988 in the exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture in the Museum of Modern Art to see, by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley was curated. As a result, Coop Himmelb (l) au was henceforth included in the group of deconstructivist architects . The bureau has never officially counted itself in this group. However, certain working practices, such as collage , and the architectural language show similarities with other architects in this direction.

World-renowned institutions such as the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles, the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) in Vienna and the Center Pompidou show works by Coop Himmelb (l) au in their permanent exhibitions. In 1996, Coop Himmelb (l) au was invited to represent Austria to the 6th International Architecture Biennale in Venice. Since then, the office has been represented there regularly and has presented projects such as the Musée des Confluences in Lyon and the Guangzhou Opera House. The Musée des Confluences in Lyon was also presented from 2002 to 2003 at the Latent Utopias exhibition in Graz. Coop Himmelb (l) au was also represented several times in the Aedes East Gallery in Berlin, for example in the exhibitions Skyline 1985, The Vienna Trilogy + One Cinema 1998 and in an exhibition for the competition for the BMW Experience and Delivery Center in 2002. In The same year Coop Himmelb (l) au was present at the 8th Architecture Biennale in Venice with the BMW Welt projects and a design for the new World Trade Center . In 2007/2008 the office was the subject of the exhibition COOP HIMMELB (L) AU. Beyond the Blue of the MAK in Vienna. Coop Himmelb (l) au was represented at the 11th Architecture Biennale in Venice with two contributions: Astroballon 1969 Revisited - Feedback Space in the Arsenale and Brain City Lab in the Italian Pavilion. In 2009 the exhibition COOP HIMMELB (L) AU. Beyond the Blue can be seen at the Wexner Center for the Arts , Columbus (Ohio) .

Coop Himmelb (l) au was responsible for the design of several exhibitions, for example Paradise Cage: Kiki Smith and Coop Himmelb (l) au , which was shown in 1996 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles . One of the most famous is the exhibition Rudi Gernreich: Fashion will go out of fashion from 2000 for the Styrian autumn in Graz, which was later shown in Philadelphia .

plant

Beginnings

In 1968 Coop Himmelb (l) au described its own name as follows:

  • "Coop sky blue is not a color, but the idea of ​​making architecture light and changeable like clouds with imagination."

This credo determined the work of the group for the first years of their work. The architecture should be light and changeable like clouds, i.e. flexible, mobile, fleeting, organic. The fact that Coop Himmelb (l) au also spoke of the “idea” of an architecture also shows that the group was initially less concerned with a structural implementation than with an architectural statement and the search for pioneering structural alternatives. The first approaches to realizing such a lightweight, changeable architecture were pneumatic projects. The idea was to create inflatable, movable, easy to dismantle and changeable, mobile architecture with the help of the new building material air. In 1968, the year it was founded, Coop Himmelb (l) au presented the pneumatic residential unit “Villa Rosa”, which was the first work that corresponded to the philosophy of changeable cloud architecture. At its core, the Villa Rosa consisted of a sloping room structure, a kind of scaffolding, supplemented by a series of tubes and cannulas. This framework carried several capsules of different sizes made of soft, air-filled balloons, which offered living space through the inner cavity. “The larger ones hung with sterile supply and disposal hoses, supporting ribs and 'breathers' [- a kind of air membrane -] on the drip of the supply frame [...]. Inside, they contained rotating, so-called 'pneumo beds', above which audiovisual installations were installed. The smaller tires functioned like heart-lung machines as pulsing balloons, while the smallest housed the odor capsule, the audiovisual program box and the Indian heart. ”With its satellite-like shape and the constantly pulsing tires, Villa Rosa clearly borrows from that Cyber ​​aesthetics of the late 1960s, at the same time it arouses strong organic associations through the constantly pulsating tires, so that the impression of a living organism is almost created here. Coop Himmelb (l) au effectively demonstrated a contrast to what they called the cold, dead, inhumane architecture of the post-war period. The property was never realized for actual use. In contrast, the Villa Rosa was presented as a prototype of a new architectural form, which was touted as an alternative to cold functionalism and as a more humane design. However, Coop Himmelb (l) au was not the first group to be architecturally influenced by the space age, as it determined popular culture in the 1960s or discovered air as a new, trend-setting building material. Hans Hollein had already given important impulses for this, for example through his architectural fantasy “New York City, Urban Renewal Project, Bird's Eye View” from 1964 in the form of a photomontage, the cyber aesthetic of which many young Viennese architects of the time certainly rubbed against. And some young architects had already experimented with pneumoarchitecture: Walter Pichler had already presented his “Large Room” in Kapfenberg Park in 1966, a huge pneumatic bubble as an alternative spatial construct. And the Haus-Rucker-Co architectural formation, which came from the same area as Coop Himmelblau, had also started working with Pneumo-Architecture since 1967. In 1967 they presented the alternative mobile living space “Yellow Heart”, a simple pneumatic living bubble that evokes embryonic and uterine associations with its simple spherical structure with only one bed in it. Haus-Rucker-Co can thus possibly be understood as a model for the reference to instinctive, organic and lively architecture, which Coop Himmelb (l) au later expanded through the medial reference of smells, noises and tactile perception.

Urban polemics

At the end of the 1970s, despite various projects by Coop Himmelb (l) au and like-minded groups, it became apparent that the goal of reallocating dead spaces into oases of self-determined, nomadic life had no effect. The group’s first actual building projects did not change anything. As a result of this realization, Coop Himmelb (l) au moved further and further away from her initially hippie-esque, fantastically dreamy articulation and became significantly more radical and aggressive both in rhetoric and in relation to the planned and implemented projects. A good 10 years after the aforementioned description of the group about its own name and the architectural concept, Coop Himmelb (l) stated:

  • “We don't want to build Biedermeier. Not now and at no other time. We are tired of seeing Palladio and other historical masks because we don't want to exclude everything that makes us restless in architecture. We want architecture that has more. We want architecture that shines, that stings, tears and tears when stretched. Architecture must be gorgeously, fiery, smooth, hard, brutal, round, tender, colored, obscene, horny, dreaming, sewing, seductive, wet, dry and heartbeat. Alive or dead. When it's cold, it's cold as a block of ice. If it's hot, it's as hot as a wing of flame. Architecture has to burn. "

The urban modification of humane architecture was now turned into a true urban polemic. The group around Prix and Swizcinsky now attracted more and more attention through provocations, and in the meantime had long held the reputation of the defants terrible of the Viennese architecture scene. It is noticeable that the rhetoric of the duo now strongly resembled that of Viennese actionism. While the group's vocabulary was previously determined by terms such as clouds, fantasy, flying or lightness, it was now dominated by words such as brutality, sting, tearing, tearing under tension or obscenity. For example, Otto Muehl said in 1963:

  • “Sometimes I feel the need to roll around like a pig in the mud. Every smooth surface provokes me, the goal is to pollute it with intense life. I crawl around on it on all fours and throw the dirt in all directions. "

In each case, the boiling rage shows itself over the dull, smooth conditions of the Austrian post-war society and its living spaces, which can only be answered with aggression and destruction. The first illustration of this new, more aggressive, burning architecture was the ready-to-build residential project study for the Viennese residential high-rise "Hot Flat", which was designed in 1978/79. All of the approximately 5 m high rooms were to be left “raw” in the manner of abandoned factory buildings, i.e. without any interior fittings, with the exception of permanently installed video and stereo systems. It was planned to leave the old car elevator in the core of the building after the construction work was completed, both for general use and to offer residents the opportunity to lift their cars to the individual floors and park on the platforms in front of their apartments. The most striking feature of the “Hot Flat”, however, was the arrow-like structure of the collectively usable group room, which pierced the complex diagonally at a lofty height and, at night - fed by countless gas nozzles - would have thrown gigantic flames into the urban sky. The group's new orientation is effective here: The time of the peaceful search for alternatives to the oppressive building situation of the post-war period with the help of cloud architecture was over. Since the organic revitalization of the urban living space had not met with any approval, one shifted to other possibilities of human influence on the city, namely the destruction, brutalization and neglect of the old and new architecture.

Shape mutation and vector architecture

On the basis of this destruction, Coop Himmelb (l) au began to find its own structural design. After the extreme phase of destruction and brutalisation, the duo Coop Himmelb (l) au relaxed significantly, which Prix and Swiczinsky, unlike many of their comrades in arms, used to manifest a constructive architectural design language: consequently, this followed from the mid-1980s when Synthesis of destruction and construction, a formal language of dismantling and re-formation, deconstruction. For example, in 1991 the group said:

  • “When we talk about ships, others think of shipwreck. But we on sails billowing in the wind. When we talk about eagles, others think of birds. But we are talking about the span of the wings. When we talk about black panthers, others think of predators. But we think of the untamed danger of architecture. When we talk about jumping whales, others think of dinosaurs. But we think of flying 30 tons. We don't find architecture in a lexicon. Our architecture can be found where thoughts are faster than hands to understand them. "

Again, the change in content of the architectural duo is initially evident in the rhetoric. Wolf D. Prix takes a stance here on the perception of one's own work by others: This is how one interprets Coop Himmelblau's working method as a shipwreck, i.e. failure, catastrophe and destruction. Think of them as birds, with which Prix certainly alluded to its own reputation as whimsical underdogs, as crazy and architectural fantasies. Think of predators, that is, of the aggression and the danger, the threat posed by their architectural intentions. And dinosaurs, that is, unpredictable, indomitable gigantic beings from another world, which one does not understand and with whom one would rather not be confronted. These associations, many of which would certainly have corresponded to the intentions of the duo in the early 1980s, have now been denied by them themselves: It is no longer about provocation, but about actual construction projects. It is no longer a question of polemics, but more of the original idea, new, flying, progressive, incredible and exciting architecture with new dimensions. Coop Himmelb (l) au no longer presented the architecture as an expression of profound aggression against functionalism and its society, but as an end in itself. The focus was now on building again. One of the most famous projects from that time was the roof extension of a law firm on Falkestrasse and Biberstrasse in Vienna. The law firm Schuppich Sporn & Winischhofer was planning to expand its office space on the mezzanine and on the first floor of the building as early as 1983. 400 square meters of roof were to be converted into usable space. The main focus should be on the central boardroom. In addition, smaller office units were planned. At a height of 21 meters, Coop Himmelb (l) au designed a multi-part, dynamic steel and glass attachment that tore out in different directions and which extended the Wilhelminian style substructure by two floors, each 3.90 meters high and 200 square meters. The duo summarized the fragmented, small-scale construction under a large, space-generating arc of tension. This spanned the entire construction like a sharply drawn arch or like a lightning bolt that guides the entire dynamics and tension of the attachment through the overhang over the edge of the roof onto the street. The metaphor currently chosen by Prix and Swiczinsky of the “sails blown by the wind” and the “span of the wings” can be found in the roof extension on Falkestrasse: The destruction here had turned into deconstruction, which gave the architects the experimental freedom, the limits of the To exhaust the possibilities within the architecture and to tread new, not yet trodden paths. This shows the path that the architectural duo has taken over the years: they had distanced themselves from the aggressive, provocative demeanor and returned to "the idea of ​​using imagination to make architecture as light and changeable as clouds". Only now it was no longer a question of the pure idea with the help of the imagination, but of the experiment, how far one can go with the imagination and the pure idea, while at the same time keeping an eye on the structural implementation. This professionalization of the original dreamers architects was also reflected in the naming of the group in the mid-1990s: The letter "L" in the blue of Himmelb (l) au was set in parenthesis, so that the reading Himmelbau was also possible: This made one clear Shifting the emphasis away from the pure dream and towards more construction.

Buildings and projects (selection)

UFA-Palast Prager Strasse, Dresden
Gasometer Vienna
Gasometer, Vienna
Art Academy, Munich
BMW World, Munich

drafts

  • Tower and bar , planned for the Mariahilfer Platzl, Vienna (not realized)

Awards

Web links

Commons : Coop Himmelb (l) au  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Exhibition COOP HIMMELB (L) AU. Beyond the blue. Archived from the original on May 28, 2012 ; accessed on August 13, 2017 .
  2. ↑ Hatje, Gerd (ed.): Coop Himmelb (l) au. Architecture is now. Projects, (un) buildings, actions, statements, drawings, texts. 1968 to 1983, 1968, p. 199.
  3. ^ Werner, Frank: Covering + Exposing: The architecture of Coop Himmelb (l) au. Basel, Berlin, Boston 2000, p. 28.
  4. ^ Werner, Frank: Covering + Exposing: The architecture of Coop Himmelb (l) au. Basel, Berlin, Boston 2000, p. 28.
  5. ^ Werner, Frank: Covering + Exposing: The architecture of Coop Himmelb (l) au. Basel, Berlin, Boston 2000, pp. 11/12.
  6. ^ Coop Himmelb (l) au: Architektur muss brennen, Graz 1980, p. 8.
  7. ^ Werner, Frank: Covering + Exposing: The architecture of Coop Himmelb (l) au. Basel, Berlin, Boston 2000, p. 12
  8. ↑ Muehl, Otto: The psycho-physical naturalism, Vienna 1963.
  9. ^ Werner, Frank: Covering + Exposing: The architecture of Coop Himmelb (l) au. Basel, Berlin, Boston 2000, p. 12.
  10. ^ Prix, Wolf D .: On the Edge, in: Architektur im AufBruch. Nine Positions on Deconstructivism, ed. Peter Noever, Munich 1991, p. 20.
  11. ^ Werner, Frank: Covering + Exposing: The architecture of Coop Himmelb (l) au. Basel, Berlin, Boston 2000, p. 36.
  12. ↑ Hatje, Gerd (ed.): Coop Himmelb (l) au. Architecture is now. Projects, (un) buildings, actions, statements, drawings, texts. 1968 to 1983, 1968, p. 199.
  13. ↑ http://www.nextroom.at/building_article.php?building_id=2331&article_id=2974