Get Off of My Cloud

Get Off of My Cloud

Wolf D. PrixCOOPHIMMELB(L)AUTexts 1968–2005

Edited by Martina Kandeler-Fritsch and Thomas Kramer

Editors: Martina Kandeler-Fritsch and Thomas KramerCoordination/Editing: Petra Königsegger-DabrowskiPublication Staff: Gudrun Hausegger, Petra Trefalt, Markus Pillhofer, Caroline Ecker, Timo Rieke, Doris Fritz, Edith FritzTranslation: Dream Coordination Office (Lisa Rosenblatt & Charlotte Eckler)

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Binding: Druckverarbeitung IDUPA Schübelin GmbH, Owen/TeckPrinted by: Offizin Chr. Scheufele, Stuttgart© 2005 Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern-Ruit, and authors

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ISBN 3-7757-1671-8 (English)ISBN 3-7757-1648-3 (German)

Printed in Germany

14 Foreword Jeffrey Kipnis

20 Foreword Christian Reder

Programmatic Texts

24 Coop Himmelblau Is Not a Color, 1968

25 Our Architecture Has no Physical

Ground Plan, 1968

26 In the Beginning Was the City, 1968

27 It Is Not That We Should Change, 1970

28 The Rift in the Mind of the City Dweller,

1977

35 Beautiful Living Makes Frozen Lives, 1978

36 The Future of the Splendid Desolation,

1978

38 City of Nature, 1978

39 The Poetry of Desolation, 1979

40 The Tougher Architecture, 1980

45 And This Is How It Works, 1980

46 Architecture Must Blaze, 1980

47 Sections through Open Architecture, 1980

48 The Drawing Is Important to Us, 1982

49 The Open System, 1982

50 Architecture Is Not Accommodating, 1983

55 Open Architecture, 1983

56 The Dissipation of Our Bodies in the City,

1988

58 On the Edge, 1989

59 For Us, a City Is . . . , 1990

60 Our Architecture Has Four Cities

and Seven Lives, 1990

64 Desert Storm, 1993

69 The End of Space Is the Beginning

of Architecture, 1993

71 Planning Concepts, 1993

72 The Architecture of Clouds, 1995

Selected Project Texts

76 Villa Rosa, 1968

78 Villa Rosa I I, 1968

80 The Cloud, 1968

82 Feedback Vibration City, 1971

84 Reiss Bar, 1977

86 Hot Flat, 1978

88 Roter Engel (Red Angel), 1980

90 The Temperature Wing, 1980

92 Merz School, 1981

94 Architecture Is Now, 1982

96 Open House, 1983

98 Apartment Complex Vienna 2, 1983

100 Youth Center Berlin, 1983

102 Skyline, 1985

104 Form-mutation, 1986

106 The Heart of a City, Melun-Sénart, 1986

108 Like Sugar. White on White, 1994

Lectures

112 Architecture Must Blaze, 1984

150 The City as a Field of Clouds, 1996

166 More and Less, 1998

184 Architecture at the End of the Twentieth

Century, 1998

202 “Let’s Be Realists. Let’s Do the Impossible”,

1999

220 Space for a Change, 2000

Interviews

228 The Desire for Oblique Walls, 1986

232 We Were Young and Very Bored, 1988

250 Body—Space—Time, 1996

262 Understanding Deconstructivism

as a Strategy, 1996

266 Resisting Accommodation, 1996

276 Paradise Cage, 1996

280 The Psyche of Architecture, 2000

290 Against the Visual Devastation of

Our Environment, 2001

300 The Box as a Burial Site for Art:

We Think That’s Boring, 2001

308 Freeing Architecture from Material

Constraints, 2001

314 The City in the Age of Globalization, 2002

326 Baroque Himmelb(l)au, 2002

Table of Contents

330 We Build Spaces That Are as Fast as Cars,

2002

338 The Rigor of Art and the Foolish

Pleasure Principle, 2002

366 An Architect Who Doesn’t Want to

Improve the World Will Always Be

a House Builder, 2002

376 On the Added Value of Form, 2003

380 Vienna Is Happy When We Build Abroad,

2005

On Friends and Foes

386 Art’s Great Wall of China—Christo, 1976

391 The Monastery—Günther Domenig, 1988

392 Wd.Z., Structural Designer—Wolfdietrich

Ziesel, 1989

393 The Prince—Wilhelm Holzbauer, 1990

394 EM = C2—Eric Owen Moss, 1991

395 About the Reiss—Michael Satke, 1991

396 Otto Wagner, a Viennese Architect, 1991

398 On Frank O. Gehry, 1995

399 Rolling the Sky—The Rolling Stones, 1995

405 Promote and Suppress: Architect,

Kingmaker, and Vampire—Philip Johnson,

1996

409 Congratulations to Margarete Schütte-

Lihotzky on Her One Hundredth Birthday,

1997

410 For Gerald Zugmann, 1997

411 Congratulations to Alvar Aalto on

His One Hundredth Birthday, 1998

412 S1-2, BKK-2, and the Poor Boys’

Brain-Surfer, 1998

414 The Proud King of Samarkand—Zvi Hecker,

1999

416 Poise Is Costly; Honor Requires

Patience—Roland Rainer, 2000

418 A Flexible Modernity—Enrique Norten, 2000

420 If That Isn’t Effectiveness!—

Günther Feuerstein, 2000

423 Hitoshi Abe, Wanderer in His Spaces, 2000

425 Rapid Eye Movement Schindler—

R.M. Schindler, 2001

426 The American Friend—Steven Holl, 2002

428 Wolf 4 Zaha—Zaha Hadid, 2003

430 Frog King and Butterfly Prince—Greg Lynn,

2003

433 Visionary in Exile—Raimund Abraham, 2005

438 Call Him Thom Mayne, 2005

. . . And Other Texts

442 A Feeling in Glass, 1972

443 A Museum Is Art, 1990

445 On Urbanized Landscapes, 1993

453 Ideas Always Have Something Dictatorial

About Them,1995

455 Against Rowing in the Architecture Galley,

1995

463 Cultural Buildings Are Mirror Images, 1996

464 Gasometer in Vienna-Simmering, 1996

468 Power to Fantasy, 1997

470 Vienna Is Not Bilbao, 1997

477 The Opposite of Fortresses, 1999

478 The Future of Architecture I, 1999

479 The Future of Architecture I I, 2000

482 Dynamite on Stage, 2000

486 Art Is Research, 2000

488 Acceptance Speech for the Großer

Österreichischer Staatspreis,

Coop Himmelb(l)au, 2000

495 MAK o Muerte, 2001

496 Architecture Is a Dog, 2001

497 The University Space Is a Free Space, 2002

499 Opening Speech of the steirischer herbst,

2002

509 Norms Are Regulative Borders, 2003

510 Architecture as a Comprehensive

Thought Process, 2003

512 96°13W /16° 33N, 2005

520 Editor’s Note / Text Index

524 Picture Index

14

GET OFF OF MY CLOUD

Get Off of My Cloud!” the first collection of lectures, interviews, and projectdiscussions by Coop Himmelblau marks a decisive moment in the evolu-tion of their architecture, a strategic swerve that should not go unnoticed.Get Off of My Cloud!” does not systematically position the practice’s work in the historical/intellectual manner of such writing-architects as Rossi,Venturi, Eisenman, or Koolhaas. Though rife with scalpel-edged apercus onarchitecture and architects, these texts are for the most part polemic decla-rations—brash, brazen, even poetic, if I push the meaning of that word toragged limits. Yet, as one reads, the turn taken by the book soon becomesabundantly obvious, in a sense the very subject of the book itself, though it is never mentioned. Time after time, Coop Himmelb(l)au expresses itsabsolute faith in the built—in building and city—as architecture’s supremeaction instrument. After so many years of reticent struggle, the practicebegins to have an opportunity to realize its architectural ambitions inimportant building commissions. Why, then, does it now decide to write?

• •

“The mayor of Vienna has said he can no longer pursue contemporary architecture projects . . . he would run the risk of losing votes. . . . In fact, nothing terrifies Vienna’s inhabitants more than the sight of modern buildings.”

“A democracy of opinion polls and complacency thrives behindBiedermeier façades.”

In these pages, readers will find not one single word that is not aboutarchitecture’s responsibility to confront the perils of political complacency.But perhaps because Coop Himmelb(l)au has not actively published itsdiscourse, it is still often treated as an “art practice”: born of raw talent,driven by iconoclasm, sustained by bravado, and rescued by daring leaps of building technique, its incongruous architecture requiring no otherintellectual justification beyond its intrinsic interest. Ridiculous, of course,even in the art world itself, at least since Duchamp, the links that joinpractice, politics, and writing have long since hardened fast. The outrages

“

“

Against Two GravitiesJeffrey Kipnis

of Vienna’s most seditious art practice, the Actionists, were in a mere thirtyyears all but forgotten until the publication of their writings in 1999 dis-seminated and opened to discussion their thoughts on the regenerativepotential of an art that assaults taboos and indulges destruction. By 2001,their photographs were hanging in New York’s august MetropolitanMuseum of Art. Architecture and art may each have special powers, but sodoes writing. But even if the Actionists and Coop Himmelb(l)au share thenaiveté that real exploits in and on the world are, or should be, sufficient,the mind-set of the two are as far apart as art and architecture. And in anycase, it was Gandhi who long before said, “You must be the change youwant to see in the world.” Or more exactly, Gandhi, who long before wrote.

Wolf Prix, most often the voice of Coop Himmelb(l)au, insists that twoissues place architecture at the nucleus of that problem of complacency.First, Prix asserts Coop Himmelb(l)au’s critical position. Architecture isdangerous; it possesses a profound power to indoctrinate, because indoc-trination occurs through incessant repetition and nothing else keepspounding conservative rhythms to the brain as insidiously as the familiarcomforts of saccharin buildings. The core premise might be summarizedthusly: It is the defining responsibility of an architect to keep the power of architecture out of the hands of those who would use it to lull us intocomplacency. Anything else is just the building business. To frustrate power and business, then, an architect must pursue power and do busi-ness, a complicated, slippery tight-rope that cannot be avoided.

“Our topic is urban life. That has nothing to do with urban

“In order to survive, a chick has to remember two images. The first is a goose . . . the second is a hawk. . . . Seeing one sign, it stays; seeing the other, it runs. That means, polemically, that if you simplify things too much you might have the point of view of a chick.”

•• •

“. . . because incongruous aesthetics are political aesthetics.”

“. . . authoritarian systems can’t stand contradiction.”

Second, Prix announces the fundamental conjecture that fuels Coop Him-melb(l)au’s mission. It is simple: architecture can stage other politics, otherdemocracies, better futures. At that moment, Coop Himmelb(l)au aligns

15

FOREWORD

development.”

16

GET OFF OF MY CLOUD

itself with the most disparaged idea in modern architecture since Le Cor-busier’s declaration, “Architecture or Revolution” and does so nakedly,ingenuously, without appeal to sophisticated irony, to post-structuralmetaphysics or to any of the other intellectual devices that architects suchas Koolhaas and Eisenman use to camouflage their covert allegiance to the very same idea.

But Prix and Swiczinsky, are not naïve; they know in detail the foibles ofModernism’s first claims to install democracies and the damage thatresulted. To them, a better political future means one and only one thing: a time when people lead lives liberated from the noxious weight of corruptpower and petty authority. Architecture’s revolutionary political influence,therefore, comes not from any power to induce mass democratic behaviorwith new images of order that Modernism hoped it to possess, but from a building’s actual ability to allow people and persons to feel unfettered,free to act, in good faith or bad, with all of the risks, uncertainties, andcontradictions that freedom entails. To Coop Himmelb(l)au, the familiarauthoritarian mantra that such architecture threatens order with anarchy is merely the chirping of baby chickens.

Like all architects everywhere, Coop Himmelb(l)au loves to wrestle withNewton’s gravity, architecture’s best friend. But what compels CoopHimmelb(l)au is the struggle against another gravity, another force thatpretends to be as natural, as inevitable as the first. But no yoke is natural,no oppression inevitable.

“. . . an architecture with fantasy, as buoyant and variable as clouds”

••• •

“Our architecture has no physical ground plan . . .”

To act against gravity is well and good, but with architecture’s power toliberate vested solely in the particular feelings a building can engender, arewe not further from an answer to our question of why Coop Himmelb(l)aunow decides to write?

Because of the exaggerated timbre of the polemics in “Get Off of My Cloud!”it is easy to mistake its specific theoretical propositions for one of its broadslogans. “Our architecture has no physical ground plan…,” perhaps the

most important statement in the book from the standpoint of contemporaryarchitectural discourse, is such an instance. Its speculative logic permeatesevery other word in the book. Understanding why it is said, what it means,and how Coop Himmelb(l)au attempts to make it a reality in its buildings is to understand not only the radical ambitions and originality of that archi-tecture, but to grasp how Coop Himmelb(l)au’s architecture joins in anexpert discussion with the architectures of Koolhaas and Eisenman, twoothers in quest of buildings without ground plans. What the statementmeans is neither obvious nor easy to grasp; indeed, to most in architectureand to virtually anyone not in the field, it verges on nonsense. After all,every building has a ground plan by definition not to mention legal require-ment, does it not?

Ground plan” does not merely name a document, the horizontal sectionalcut entitled to stand for the building, but an effect, perhaps the single mostimportant political effect in architecture. With Le Corbusier’s piloti and freeplan and Mies’s elevated platforms, Modern architecture began its assaulton the dominion of the ground in the conviction that architecture’s tradi-tional deference to the ground joined it to the feudal power mechanisms ofland and land ownership as in homeland, our land, my land. Yet that defer-ence permeated architecture, from the base of capitals, to rustication, tothe promenade from façade to grand staircase to piano nobile. To disestab-lish the authority of the ground, then, was the essential first move towardconstructing a space for democracy.

More than a half-century after those first literal steps off the ground weretaken by Modernism, the problem of disestablishing unwanted authority in a building has evolved into a far more complex issue, one that confrontsnot only the feudal regime of the ground, but the regulatory regime of the plan. Plans, after all, already have plans for us. Speculative architects today attempt to design buildings that detach not just the body, but theexistential being of its subjects from the ground plan, transporting her orhim elsewhere. Where “elsewhere” could or should be is a matter of dis-cussion; it may be in the intellect (Eisenman) or on the streets of New York(Koolhaas) or in the clouds (Coop Himmelb(l)au) but in any case, the onlyhope of getting there is a building without a ground plan.

Eisenman and Koolhaas, each in his own way, seek to transport by trans-forming the building into a diagram, a strategy intended to detach thesubject from the regime of immediate experience, with its emphasis on

17

FOREWORD

“

18

GET OFF OF MY CLOUD

satisfied expectations and phenomenological, haptic, aesthetic, andsymbolic pleasures. Koolhaas turns the building into a metropolis wherecars and subways become elevators and escalators, billboards and signsbecome graphics; Eisenman turns the building into a three dimensionalnotational field, so that every surface, floor, wall, ceiling, becomes a text to read. Coop Himmelb(l)au, on the other hand, attempts to accomplishthe transport by using immediate experience, not by distracting from it.With Coop Himmelb(l)au, a building remains a building. None of theseeffects are easy to accomplish, but it is perhaps fair to say that Coop Him-melb(l)au’s aim is the most difficult. It is easier to erase experience or to replace one experience with another than it is to modulate a familiarexperience from one key into another, even more so if that modulationmust serve a different political end. Eisenman and Koolhaas argue that the regime of experiential pleasures associated with the building is so loaded with the mechanisms of conservatism and complacency that Coop Himmelb(l)au’s ambition is all but hopeless. You are about to readCoop Himmelb(l)au’s counter response.

As I read the book, I recalled an exchange of letters between LeopoldMozart, Wolfgang’s teacher and most astute and ardent critic, and his son.Leopold complained that one passage in the manuscript of a late pianoconcerto must contain a mistake, since the resulting music was obviouslytoo discordant to bear. Wolfgang replied that the manuscript was correctand went on to explain to his father why the passage was written as suchand how to listen to it so as to hear its new music. Whether or not Leopoldever made the existential leap necessary to hear the erstwhile noise asmusic and to experience its new feelings I do not know. Today audiencesaround the world hear that same passage as if its poignancy was entirelyself-evident, and an astute performer must work very hard to re-animate its harmonic extremities.

I do know this, however. As a critic and teacher, I follow Coop Himmel-b(l)au’s work closely enough to see sharp distinctions between one projectand another and to distinguish their work from work by other architectsthat to many, seems to be similar. My visit to the UFA Cinema Center inDresden left me filled with thoughts, impressions, and feelings that utterlyconfirmed my affection for their work. But it was not until I read the state-ment, “Our architecture has no physical ground plan…,” that I actuallyunderstood the political depth of that building for the first time, to compre-hend what it meant to walk up five flights of stairs as if there were none,

the same number of stairs whose drudgery Haussmann thought only suitablefor servants. But it is not just that I finally understand it. Now, here, today,3000 miles from Dresden, I feel it.

•••• •

Why? Because if architecture must blaze, only writing can light the match.Why, now? Because for Coop Himmelb(l)au, now more than ever, it matters.

Jeffrey Kipnis is professor of architectural design and theory at the Knowlton School ofArchitecture of The Ohio State University. His writings on art and architecture have appearedin such publications as El Croquis, Art Forum, Assemblage, and his books include Choral

Works: The Eisenman-Derrida collaboration, Perfect Acts of Architecture, and The Glass

House. As architecture/design curator for the Wexner Center for the Arts, he organized thedesign survey, “Mood River” with co-curator Annetta Massie, and “Suite Fantastique,” acompilation of four exhibitions: Perfect Acts of Architecture, The Furniture of Scott Burton,The Predator—a collaboration between Greg Lynn and Fabian Marcaccio, and Imaginary

Forces—Motion Graphics. His film, A Constructive Madness, produced in collaboration withTom Ball and Brian Neff, looks at the architect’s work on the unbuilt but seminal Peter Lewishouse project.

19

FOREWORD

20

GET OFF OF MY CLOUD

In view of this collection of texts on urbanism, architecture, and limitlessconceptual worlds, it would be plausible to understand and acknowledgeWolf D.Prix primarily as an author, as someone who writes—and not as anarchitect—if he would have had to remain content with the formulation ofclaims, of visions, and of theories. If he had never been able to build withCoop Himmelb(l)au—with the resolution “to make architecture as variableas clouds,” to pointedly contribute to shaping “the three dimensional cul-ture”—then he would have written provocative theses or mind-blowinglyrics as the poetic expression of what is conceivable, desirable, but unableto concretize. He was never held back by circumstances—which, despitesuperficial freedoms, prohibit so much—because he has a desire to build.He presents how greatly the material constraints, which constrict every-thing possible—including people, of course—into some type of bookkeep-ing, can be constructively confused and enriched. As Majakowski did in hisday, Wolf D.Prix confronts an almost compulsively paralyzed public and itsleading exponents with a staccato tempo of model-like solutions, only hisare expanded by the freedom of no longer having to believe in a revolution:

“The tougher the times, the tougher the architecture.” “. . . incongruous aesthetics are political aesthetics.” “The builders of the Tower of Babel lacked the material of reinforced concrete. We lack the material of language confusion, which we need to complete it.”

“We are looking for the unknown, for uncertain grounds, and diversity.”

“‘Making mistakes’ is the building material of architecture. The unconscious and coincidence can be the planning method.”

“We break up the word ‘Entwurf’ (design) into the syllable ‘ent’ and

Entwerfen (design)comes from ‘werfen.’Planning has to do withAhnung’ (premonition)”Christian Reder

“

‘

21

FOREWORD

the word ‘wurf.’ Ent-wurf (de-sign). The prefix ent as in ent-äußern, to renounce, or ent-flammen, to stir up. Wurf like werfen, to throw.”

“Planning clearly has something to do with premonition.”

He constantly beguiled adverse conditions with images, with linguisticimages, with highly experimental models, and with the insistent claim that far more is possible than is considered so. He is permanently involvedin further developing dramatically expanded dimensions for the favoritebuzzword of today’s conceivers of efficiency and designers of reality—fea-sibility: worlds of emotion, surprise spaces that open up vast realms. If hewere a linguist or philosopher, already this alone would be considered aremarkable achievement. Who else is so successful in vividly cracking opencemented-in word use that the result of this process actually stands beforeour eyes in built examples? Grouchy, futile dissenting voices bemoaningPalladio—why is everything so crooked, why is there so little love of detail,all order is repealed, everything seems to fly away, it mocks harmonioussymmetries, it can only generate an effect as media hype—sound that muchmore morose after the realization of the first major buildings, like an echoof a gloomy past that ricochets from the technical possibilities and livelier,hybrid urbanity.

Completely giving up the dream of a changed world,” Wolf D.Prix said tome recently in a published conversation on the theme of project worlds,would fade out essential dimensions of our self understanding. All that iscertain is that architecture can’t afford to do that. Architecture can actuallyblock a lot. It is the architect’s responsibility to recognize this and as anoffensive strategy, to always think of possibilities.” Also the great poet ofour generation, Bob Dylan, has remained a realistic believer. “It was said,”he wrote in his Chronicles, “that World War II spelled the end of the Age of Enlightenment, but I wouldn’t have known it. I was still in it. Somehow I could still remember and feel the light of something about it.” When lightand space play such a delimiting role as they do for Coop Himmelb(l)au,then questions of progress are posed differently; totally direct.

Christian Reder, born 1944 in Budapest. Project advisor, author, essayist, Professor for Art and Knowledge Transfer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Publications with/onWolf D.Prix and Coop Himmelb(l)au: Forschende Denkweisen. Essays zu künstlerischem

Arbeiten, Springer Verlag, Vienna and New York 2004; Lesebuch Projekte. Vorgriffe, Aus-

brüche in die Ferne, Springer Verlag, Vienna and New York 2006. www.christianreder.net

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Programmatic Texts

GET OFF OF MY CLOUD

24

Coop Himmelblau

Is Not a ColorCoop Himmelblau is not a color but

an idea, of creating architecture with

fantasy, as buoyant and variable as

clouds.19

68

24

25

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Ou

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1968

PROGRAMMATIC TEXTS

25

Our

Architecture

Has no

Physical

Ground Plan

GET OFF OF MY CLOUD

26

In the beginning was the city:

the anti-city, or rather, the dreamed-of city.But like all urban projectsof the sixties, our cities,too, were only apresentiment (because we

had never seen it) of NewYork, the dissectedmetropolis. Naked reality.The vertical city, thesubterranean city, bundledtraffic transformers, themobility of life, thetechnology. All that is andwas real in New York.To this we added only the

dream of poetry: The citybeats like a heart—the cityflies like breath. And anexpanding feeling for lifefulfills these imaginarycities.

Inth

eB

egin

nin

gW

as

the

City

1968

This urban poetryhas sometimesbeen confusedwith utopia.

Rudi Dutschke says that.

We say that.

1970

It Is Not

That We

Should Change

It is not that we should change in

order to live in society, but society

has to change so we can live in it.

It is not that we should change in

order to live within architecture,

but architecture has to react to

our movements, feelings, moods,

emotions, so that we want to live

within it.

PROGRAMMATIC TEXTS

27

Wolf D. Prix CooP HiMMElB(l)AU Get OFF OF MY ClOud WOlF d. Prix texts 1968 - 2005

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