COOP HIMMELBLAU.

BEYOND THE BLUE

I. EXIL AUF DER RINGSTRASSE
II. AUFRUHR IN MAIN STREET
I. EXILE ON RINGSTRASSE
II. EXCITATIONS ON MAIN STREET

Exile on Ringstrasse
What really matters about the architecture of COOP HIMMELB(L)AU ís not what it means or even
how it looks, but how it behaves. With behavior in mind, then, where do we begin? Two of Víenna's greats, Sigmund
Freud and Otto Rank (né Rosenfeld), suggest that birth trauma might be a good place to start, especially if the behavior
in question ís anxious or unruly. Let us see.

Pregnancy and gestation

1960: Hans Hollein's Die Stadt, a drawing that seems to haunt the unconscíous of COOP HIMMELB(L)AU to this day.
'62: The Soviet Union and U.S. move to the brink of nuclear war over Cuba. '63: Hans Hollein and Walter Pichler attack
the functionalism of "Arbeitsgruppe 4'​1​, and follow with an influential series of joint and indivi​dual conceptual projects
and texts. '63—'68: The extraordinary Günther Feuerstein rekindles and fans the flames of experimental architecture in
Austria with his club seminars, reintroducing historical discourse and the discredited modern internationalists with the
same vigor as he brings to the then-current speculations of Superstudio and Archigram. Under hís influence, stu​dents
Wolf D. Prix and Helmut Swiczinsky travel to the Architectural Association of London. '65: Hans Hollein, Günther
Feuerstein, Sokratis Demetrius. Gustav Peichl, and Walter Pichler seize control of Der Bau from the technocratic
functionalists and reintroduce historical, intellectual, and cultural discourse to the journal. reviving interest in Adolf Loos,
Otto Wagner, Josef Hoffmann, Rudolph M. Schindler, Frederick Kiesler, Konstantin Melnikov, and others. '66: David
Greene's Living Pod. Michael Webb's Cushic/e, inflatables proliferate.
'67: Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Pot. Acid. Bonnie and Clyde.1

1.​»​Arbeitsgruppe 4":
Architektengruppe, gegr unit Austrian group of architects formed in 1952 von by Wilhelm Holzbauer, Friedrich Kurrent
und and Johannes Spalt an der at the Akademie der bildenden Künste, Wien Vienna, Meisterklasse master class
Cien​-​lens Holzmeister.

Der Bau: offizielle Zeitschrift der Zentralvereinigung der Architekten österreichs official magazine of the Central
Association of Austrian Architects, 1965 unter der neuen Leitung von Hans Hollein und seinen Kollegen in Bau
umbenannt und radikalisiert radicalized by Hans Hollein and his colleagues as Bau with the takeover.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band: achtes Album der eighth album by The Beatles, 1967.
Bonnie and Clyde: Spielfilm über zwei Bank​ráuber, die zur Zeit der GroBen Depression in den USA durchs Land zogen
film about two bank robbers who roamed the US during the Great Depression, inszeniert von directed by Arthur Penn,
1967, mit starring Warren Beatty als as Clyde Barrow und and Faye Dunaway als as Bonnie Parker, gilt als Meilenstein
der Filmgeschichte, denn er bricht Tabus über die Darstellung von Sex. Verbrechen und nonkon​formistisches Verhalten
considered a landmark film in cinema history for breaking taboos about the portrayal in film of sex, crime and
nti-estab​lishment behavior.

2.Hans Hollein, „Alles ist Architektur, 1967, in: Bau ig.vol. 23, Heft issue 1/2, Wien Vienna 1968; Schimpftirade aus 1000
~tern gegen die traditionelle Auffassung von Architektur 1000 word rant against the traditional view of architecture that
captured the imagination of the radical architectural movernent world wide.

Structures Gonflables: Ausstellung und Kata​log der exhibition and catalogue by the Groupe UTOPIE, prásentiert auf der
presented at the ARC/MAMVP in Paris, Márz March 1968.

Labor Pains: January 1968: Hollein's explosive manifes​to "Alles ist Architektur" appears in Bau. March '68: the Groupe
UTOPIE organizes the seminal inflatables exhibition Structures Gonflables that draws a surreal but compelling equation
between inflatable architecture and radical situationist-inspired political action.​2

March 1968: COOP HIMMELB(L)AU is born from an inflatable uterus, Cloud amidst the trauma: Vietnam War — the Tet
Offensive, My Lai Massacre, General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shoots a VietCong prisoner in the head on the front page of
every newspaper in the world, World-wide anti-war demonstrations. U.S. Civil Rights riots. May. Red Army Fraction.
King & Kennedy assassinated, Warhol shot. Electric Ladyland. Beggars Banquet. Cheap Thrills. 2001: A Space
Odyssey. Barbare//a. Schamlos. Moos auf den Steinen. Saddam Hussein seizes control of Iraq. Alexander Dubcek's
Prague Spring blossoms only to be smothered within months by 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 5,000 tanks. Chicago
7, Black Panthers. Student bloodbath in Mexico ten days before the Summer Olympics. Marcel Duchamp and Yuri
Gagarin die. Mao Zedong orders all intellectuals out of the cities to work in farms. The "con​cept album" kills the 45rpm
single.​3

Vienna is one of the few European capitals that is mostly quiet during the May uprisings in Paris, London, New York,
and elsewhere throughout the world, though Günter Brus began serving a six-month prison sen​tence for the crime of
"degrading symbols of the state" during the Kunst und Revolution event. Hans Hollein and Peter Noever publish
Svobodair, a tongue in cheek work of conceptual architecture in which a canister of Environmental Control Spray
produces "good moods", thereby solving the problems of architecture's collabo​ration with offices and other suffocating
social settings. 1969: a man on the moon, Woodstock, the first ATM.
Altamont. The Internet begins.​4
3 Electric Ladyland. Beggars Banquet. Cheap Thrills: Einflussreiche Konzeptalben der Rockmusik von Influential rock concept

album-11s respectively by Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones und and Janis Joplin.

2001: A Space Odyssey. Barbarella: Einfluss​reiche Science-Fiction•Filme von Influential Sci-Fi films by Stanley Kubrik bzw. and

Roger Vadim respectively.

Schamlos: herausragender ósterreichischer Film von exceptional Austrian movie by Eddy Saller. Wáhrend die meisten

ósterrei​chischen Filme in den 1960er Jahren Heimat​filme mit farbenfrohen Bildern über die besse​ren Zeiten in der Monarchie waren,

produzierte Saller einen Kriminalfilm in Schwarzweiß, ein Portrát des rauen Alltags im Nachkriegsóster​reich, das das Land

schockierte While Austrian movies in the 60s mainly were Heimatfilme, i.e, colorful pictures about the better days in the monarchy —

Saller produced a black and white crime exploitation film exploring the gritty truth of post-war Austria that shocked Austrians.

Moos auf den Steinen: wichtigster und unver​gesslicher österreichischer Film des Jahrzehnts most remarkable and memorable

Austrian film of the decade, inszeniert von directed by Georg Lhotsky. Der Film basiert auf dem Roman aus dem Jahre 1956 von

Gerhard Fritsch, der am Drehbuch mitwirkte, und setzt erfolgreich Ideen der Nouvelle Vague um. Er liefert eine brillante Allegorie auf

Ósterreichs ldentitátskrise und die soziokulturellen Probleme, die in einer von den Erinnerungen an ihr einst machtvolles Kaiser​reich

geplagten Nachkriegs Republik entstehen Based on the 1956 novel by Austrian author Gerhard Fritsch, who co-wrote the script, the

film successfully adapted French New Wave ideas, while providing a brilliant allegory for Austria's identity crisis and the sociocultural

problems emerging in a post-war republic haunted by the memories of its once powerful empire,

Kunst und Revolution: Ereignis organisiert von den Wiener Aktionisten Event organized by Vienna Aktionists Otto Mühl, Günter Brus

und and Oswald Wiener an der Wiener Universitát at the University of Vienna. Nach der Aktionsveranstaltung, die einen Skandal in

der Presse ausleiste, wurden Mühl und Brus verhaftet After the Aktionsveranstaltung, which caused a scandal in the press; Muehl

und Brus were arrested.

Svoboda: Spray zur Umweltveránderung Environmental Control Spray, entwickelt von developed by Hans Hollein und and Peter

Noever, 1968.

So, do we now understand the architecture of COOP HIMMELB(L)AU? The inflatables and public actions perhaps, maybe, a little.

The Cloud, Villa Rosa. Heart City - The White Sud. Action. Basel Kontakt. Supersommer. The House with the Flying Roof. How could
they avoid it? The strange equation of Happen​ings, street actions, inflatables, and pods were every​where, in every mayor city, at the

Osaka World's Fair, in movies, on TV. In a world paralyzed by fear, these were a better future become the present: plastic,

technologi​cal, mobile, informal, personal, free of history's wrinkles and dust, free of corruption, of ideology, of arrogance, of fear. Free

of gravity, in both senses of the word.

NEW YORK: (2001) "The Inflatable Moment," celebrates a time when, íf you didn't have an idea, you just didn't show up. You'd be

too embarrassed. How different from today's c/imate of fear, when showing up with an idea could get you fired.

Inflatable architecture was a terrible idea, as it happens. Yes, but so what? In those days, a terrible idea was better than no idea. At

times, a bad idea is even better than a good idea. Architects were explor​ing the relationship between metaphor and material reality.

There's nothing like a bad idea for showing up the difference between them.

Herbert Muschamp, The New York Times 5

But, then, why are they still at it today? When the mad​ness of those times, delicious and horrifying, finally began to ebb, why did

COOP HIMMELB(L)AU not disperse and fade away, as did most of the other architectural visionaries - Archigram, UTOPIE,

Superstudio, Missing Link? Certainly, by the time they build the beautiful but oh so well mannered exhibition pavilion lounge for

Cincinnati Milacron 1974, the realities of the profession and fatal limitations of plastics and pods could not be ignored

Clients were going to be wealthy, powerful and politi​cally established, buildings were not going to move or bounce,
program was not going away, and neither the shape of a building nor the material it was made of were in and of
themselves going to free anyone from anything. And more to the point, if they could not figure out how to cope with
those realities without abandon​ing their naive ambitions, there were plenty of archi​tects with no qualms and ready to
work.
Ever since, that has been what LOOP HIMMELB(L)AU has been doing. In retrospect, Prix and Swiczinsky were less
about inflatables as such than about any architecture capable of clearing a new space liberated from the burden of stale
clichés and dead ideologies. Some indication of the direction that the practice would head in also comes from the
Cincinnati Milacron Pavilion, though not from the project itself but from its documentation. A short clip at the openings
shows young Swiczinsky and Prix inside the space, taiking, drinking, smoking cigarettes. If the image seems innocently
staged, its message is prophetic, because from that point forward the two would concentrate strictly on the new
sensations their architectural space could produce.
Maybe it was a mistake, then, to start with the traumas of their birth; perhaps, we should have started earlier, with their
heritage. But how far back: the Allied Occu​pation, the Anschluss, Freud, fin de siècle? No; none of these, too obvious,
too broad. To 1857, then, when Franz Joseph wilis into existence the Ringstra@e? An ancient city wall disappears, only
to be replaced by an urban manifestation of the strangely convoluted, por​ous barrier between ego and id/superego.
Today, the RingstraBe seems to draw the line between the possibilities of a confident Vienna that values the pre​sent as
a step toward the future, and a bourgeois Vienna that wallows in petty gratifications and clichés of the past.
But how COOP HIMMELB(L)AU's work is in any sense Viennese is a different question. A city of imponderables,
Vienna's spirit oscillates between extremes of depth and shallowness, between profound humanity and base antipathy.
On the one hand, it has nurtured some of Western civilization's most humane talents, from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
to Kurt Gódel, but on the other, it is notorious for the animosity it has shown toward the likes of Sigmund Freud, Oskar
Kokoschka, Gustav Mahler, Use Meitner, Frederick Kiesler, Arnoid Schönberg, Elfriede Jelinek and others, all of whom
it today proclaims with pride.
No wonder the psyches of some of its most adventu​rous architects are so knotted. After all, though buil​dings may be its
paint and the city its canvas, it is the heart and will of collective life that is always the true subject matter of architecture.
There is no such thing as a private house any more than there is such a thing as a private language — as Ludwig
Wittgenstein taught us. Thus, whatever leap any architect hopes to make to a new space, it will always be to a new
collective space that can only be reached from the old space the architect is formed in, knows, lives, and leaps from.

That COOP HIMMELB(L)AU is Viennese, therefore, must inhabit our thoughts even if we can never understand what
that means, and it makes of this first retrospective of their work in Vienna not just one ex​hibition among many. All the
more because it is at the MAK, toward which it has always been destined. Yet, though all of the historical and
psychological turmoil is ingrained in the architecture of COOP HIMMELB(L)AU, does it explain anything? Does it help
us better grasp its behavior? Or have we made the mistake of confus​ing insights finto lives of the architects with insights
into the performance of their architecture. To get inside these buildings requires a different strategy.

Beautiful Living Makes Frozen Lives 1978

The home is still regarded as the last refuge in an inhospitable environment. What is usually forgotten, however, is that
the home is an integral part of "our built environ​ment." If the home is separated from its direct or indirect surroundings, it
becomes a submarine in a sea of bedroom cities.
Living happens at four levels:
The first is the apartment itself.
The second is the building in which the apartment is located. The third is the street you live on.
The fourth is the city in which you live.
The apartment is more than an isolated home. Living goes far beyond the four walls of the flat. Living does not end at
the front door. The way to work, the way to school, the possibilities for shopping and recreation — all of there influence
the quality of life and living as much as the furnishings do. But it is the vitality of the person living there that will
ultimately determine whether the apartment is hot or cold. In a hot fiat, one can use and identify with all the chances and
opportunities our urban environment offers. The language of the hot fiat is the language of our urban civilization. This
demands courage from all the participants — courage to correlate the outer and inner worlds (home and city) and to
seek the identity of society in the entire realm of experience. In a beautiful submarine, one loses interest in the
surroundings.
Living becomes bad living and bad living freezes life.

Architecture Must Blaze

1980
You can judge how bad the seventies were by looking at its uptight architecture.
A democracy of opinion polis and complacency thrives behind Biedermeier facades. We have no delire to build
Biedermeier. Not now or no other time. We are tired of seeing Palladio and other historical masks. Because with
architecture, we don't want to exclude everything that is disquieting.
We want architecture that has more.
Architecture that bleeds, that exhausts, that whirls, and even breaks. Architecture that lights up, stings, rips, and tears
under stress.
Architecture has to be cavernous, fiery, smooth, hard, angular, brutal, round, delicate, colorful, obscene, lustful, dreamy,
attracting, repelling, wet, dry, and throbbing.
Alive or dead.
If cold, then cold as a block of ice.
If hot, then hot as a blazing wing.

Architecture must blaze.

FEUER ERPROBT.Sylvia Lavin

How is it possible that the words "architecture must blaze" were not uttered in 1968? The phrase seems perfectly,
quintessentially, vintage-Vietnam era. It must be on the sound track that goes along with news footage of flames spitting
out of the Yale Arts and Archi​tecture Building, bras burning, and napalm exploding. Chip Lord must have been provoked
into starting Ant Farm by hearing the slogan and was likely still chanting it when his cadillac drove into a wall of flaming
TVs for Media Burn; Adolfo Natalini must have been think​ing it as he flooded the monuments of Italy with water as a
fire-fighter inundates the buildings he hopes to save; Arata Isozaki was surely silently screaming the phrase as he made
Re-ruined Hiroshima, a post-apo​calyptic landscape with nothing but a few fire-ravaged remains. "Architecture must
blaze" must have been burning the lips and ears of every young architect in 1968, producing then a sound so vivid that
still today hearing these three !die words conjures up the primary images and events of a critica! era, one that remains
cataclysmically active in our understanding of the present and of presentness itself.
The historical power of these few words is remarkable; the palpable images they produce seem as real as the events
they describe; their ethnopoetic clarity convin​cingly reproduces for us the political passions of a now aging "young
generation"; they recreate in their utter​ance the very desire of architecture to become per​petually new and a continuous
event. In their force, the words ring true. Except they are false. "Architecture must blaze" does not enter the architectural
record until 1980; these words were not said in the midst of an act of guerilla architectural warfare or in the heat of an
architectural happening but were carefully written by Wolf D. Prix to serve as the project description for The Blazing
Wing, an elaborately engineered slow burn against which the surrounding buildings of the Universi​ty of Technology in
Graz were protected by water curtains; the slogan was not an attack on post-war slum clearing or cold-war institutional
repression but an over​heated reaction against too much Biedermeier furniture; an oratorical funeral pyre for postmodern
wooden armoires. This apparent cry from the heart — as im​passioned and hence personal a manifesto as there ever
was — doesn't even belong to Wolf D. Prix anymore: Google the phrase and discover that in 2000 it was snatched up
from the vortex of manifestos to become the proper title of a book by someone else altogether who would have been but
a child in 1968. This forceful set of words — impossible to imagine being said with irony, only possible to imagine being
used as an expres​sion of almost humiliating conviction and love — turns out to be deceitful as well as easy to steal,
unworthy and unfaithful, and crushingly fragile.
The combination of monumental certainty and provisio​nal vulnerability is characteristic — and a troubling characteristic
— of the work of COOP HIMMELB(L)AU (and perhaps of the Austrian mentalité). Hubris and humility, aggression and
anguish, inhere in the firm's founding metaphor. On the one hand, their blue sky and the many clouds it has generated
since the cooperative was established in 1968 are related to the long lineage of efforts to capture the soft evanescence
of clouds in the hard medium of architecture, from baroque stone work in which deep relief was used to amplify the
action of sun and shadow on a surface, casting animations the way clouds evanesce in the sky, to Diller + Scofidio's
Blur Building or Gnuform's Purple Haze that uses water to produce supple and luminous vapors that waft around an
immobile frame. On the other hand, Wolf D. Prix has always tried to build the cloud itself — not attach a cloud or a
balloon to a building as in the Pepsi Pavilion or the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, projects that maintain a distinction
between the stability of the architectural structure and the atmospheric effects of clouds that would seem to undo it. Prix
forces architecture to perform like a demiurgic Hercules who insists on nothing less than subduíng the cloud, conflating
its fluidity with the rigidity of building to form a single impossible medium
The reason this impossible contradiction is troubling a​s​ the source for an architectural practice — as opposed to simply
nostalgically deconstructivist — is because it is not a generic or structural contradiction but a speci​fic one that
addresses itself directly to the potentials promised to architecture today by often false memories of 1968. Nineteen
sixty-eight is now a pretext for reflecting on modernity's neglected and illegitimate project of contemporaneity; 1968, the
mythical home of all things going up in flames, is a means to outsmart those currents within architectural thinking that
insists on an equivalence between architecture and building, still believe in the functionalist fallacy, and deeply fear
being intoxicated by the immersive spectacle of intense architectural provocation — and conflagration. For Charles
Baudelaire, the figure of the prostitute captured the ephemeral fashionability that made presentness something other
than heroically modern or merely recent. Nineteen sixty-eight is our prostitute. But what is this figure of contemporaneity
wearing today? Is she a hooker in Paco Rabanne or an archi​tect in a pneumatic outfit? It seems so much easier today
to imagine Sienna Miller playing Edie Sedgwick in a Mylar dress than Wolf D. Prix inserting his head into the big plastic
bubble that capped his White Suit. Could it be that 1968, the very possibility of the contemporary, is passé? There is
nothing more grating, more completely undoing — more utterly destructive to architecture's conventional values and
metronomic function — than something that tries to be up-to-date but is really just dated. This is the trouble with, or
what is troubling to architecture about, COOP HIMMELB(L)AU. Every project — from the earliest performances to the
concrete swirls of BMW Welt to the lift of the Akron Art Museum's wing — asserts the present moment and
simultaneously provokes the anxiety that this architec​ture, posing as now, is really just yesterday.
In the current regime of Prada and good taste, wearing silly suits is too big a price to pay for novelty. No one is more
afraid of becoming a has-been than an architect and therefore no figure could be more unsettling than an architect
drenched with the novelty of the past who still says things like "get off of my cloud". Yet listen closely to any thinking
architect and you will find that they secretly still chant "architecture must blaze". Prix's retroactive catchphrase does not
so much make 1968 feel new or old but rather reveals that 1968 is crucial to the way we think about contemporaneity as
such.
COOP HIMMELB(L)AU's 40 years of research into how to build a hot fire or a cloudy day do not constitute
a series of attempts to make architecture express permanent change or be permanently changeful — as was the goal of
Cedric Price's Fun Palace. Rather, the work of COOP HIMMELB(L)AU forms an ongoing effort to shift architecture into
the contemporary, to make architecture operate like a shifter, as do words such as you and me, here and now, always
the same yet never identical, always accurate but only for a moment and in a specific context. That is what is so 1-
formidable and nettlesome about Wolf D. Prix and his proleptic "architecture must blaze". These three little words, as
ponderous a thought about architecture as they are evanescent a statement about building, are always right on time;
true in 1968, false in 1980, and ,contemporary in 2007.