Vienna, where they sell gift packs of Mozart Kuchen in the Konditorei, and Freud glares interrogatively from the fifty schilling note. On Seilerstätte, two yellow eyes blink on the billboard declaring Cats—6 Jahr! Opposite the Ronacher theatre is the Coop Himmelb(l)au office, a capacious studio arrived at from a typically gloomy staircase twining round an exposed elevator. Two faces glower from a fading poster on one wall, captioned, in German, “Architecture Must Burn.” Side-by-side mug shots, they have the sullen ferocity of the Baader-Meinhof. Folie à deux.
Helmut Swiczinsky and Wolf Prix are the principals of Coop Himmelb(l)au, and they’ve been partners in crime, as it were, since the 1960s. Lately they’ve been garnering notoriety well beyond the Ringstrasse: the Museum of Modern Art’s Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition featured their work among its Magnificent Seven, and now the Architectural Association in London is giving them the full exhibition-plus-publication package tour. A one-to-one chunk of a house they’re doing in Malibu, California, has taken up residence in a corner of Bedford Square to coincide with the London show.
Who are they, and what is Coop Himmelb(l)au?
A perusal of their out-of-print treatise Architecture Is Now— that fat black book which did the rounds at the AA and was similarly sought after at Jaap Rietman’s in New York a few years back—reveals the two gentlemen to be of a poetic persuasion, keen on enigmatic slogans, generally following the formula “Architecture plus verb plus noun.” They also manufacture a fair quantity of mystical manifestos. And they have built a few small interludes of . . . well, is it architecture, or has that word already been, so to speak, co-opted? Should it perhaps be reserved for rather larger chunks of built form?
Let us say that Coop Himmelb(l)au is on the experimental end of the profession, teetering toward performance art and happenings. And the work—at least the drawings of the buildings they might become—looks a lot like the kind of creatures that crunch when you tread on them: arthropods with articulated carapaces of metal and glass and quivering proboscis-like tubes of stainless steel. Messrs. Prix and Swiczinsky are architecture’s Beastie Boys. But don’t mention the reptilian resemblances—it’s been said too many times before. What they’re really about is . . . SPACE!
“We want to build architecture like clouds,” Wolf Prix tells me. “Architecture which reacts to people, not the other way round.” Himmelb(l)au, he explains, means “sky blue.” “It was the time of very poetic names: Archizoom, Ant Farm, Archigram, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones,” Prix continues, describing the climate in which the practice was founded in 1968. “We were trying to expand this boring thing, architecture, to make it more complex than it is now.”
No modest enterprise, this Coop Himmelb(l)au. What it has done to date are a lot of projects with evocative titles (try Hot Flat) and some built interventions, mostly in Vienna: the Studio Baumann (1985), a glorified mezzanine structure inside a small art gallery whose neoclassical facade is ruptured by a lava of aluminum, now dusty like a sloughed-off carcass from Alien; the Red Angel, a small theatre/wine bar (1980–81); the offices for ISO-Holding (1986), featuring an arrow-like tube of stainless steel charging through from the executive suites to the reception area; and the Passage Wahliss, which could be described as a corridor between display windows for a china store on Kärntner Strasse.
Most ambitious of all is the rooftop remodelling currently under construction on Falkestrasse, around the corner from Otto Wagner’s Post Office Savings Bank, which Coop Himmelb(l)au is doing for its lawyers. Deconstructive midwife Mark Wigley reached for the parasitical metaphor in acclaiming this project in his Sermon at the Tate (the “Deconstuction and Architecture” conference, previewing the MoMA exhibition) last March. It symbolised, so Wigley would have us believe, the repressed forces of architecture bursting out of their constrictive envelopes.
“We wanted to make a very attractive corner solution, so that if you’re standing in that space you have the feeling of being protected and free at the same time, like flying,” says Prix.
Well, the light was fading when Blueprint paid a call, but it struck me that this adulterated attic was rather like an exotic piece of jewellery attached to a double-breasted suit. From the street all you see, if you look carefully, is a couple of steel tubes dangling like molten chopsticks over the cornice of a regular Viennese block. Inside, a formidable medley of steel sections disport themselves beneath—at present—a flapping red tarpaulin which, when glazed, will be the world’s most complicated roof-light. Hope it doesn’t leak.
Right now, Coop Himmelb(l)au is breaking into the big time, with a factory for a wood and paper processing company nearing completion in Carinthia, Austria (a box with gizmos festooning one end), and work proceeding on the Open House in Malibu, California (Prix teaches at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles). Then there are two major projects in Vienna: a hotel and the wholesale transformation of the Ronacher theatre.
Prix shows me two foam-block models, fastened together with dressmaking pins, approximately three inches cubed. These demonstrate a radical change in the orientation of the structure (more floors, more performance space); they’re also adding to the theatre roof—another case of The Locusts Have Landed. Seems the planners weren’t too keen on this disturbance to the skyline, so Coop Himmelb(l)au obliged by shifting the offending bar in a bit, so as to avoid it looming visibly over the street. Attention turns from foam collage A to foam collage B. Such a big alteration, so swiftly, economically achieved.
Now, you may be wondering where the inspiration for this “architecture” comes from. Believe me, I have tried to probe its secret heart. And what it comes down to is a sort of spatial ecstasy experienced jointly by a pair of adult men and captured at the moment of epiphany in runic squiggles on paper. Or, as the critic Brian Hatton calls them, “vomited doodles.” At the origin of every Coop Himmelb(l)au project is an angry, twitching scrawl of pencil lines which only its makers can truly understand.
“The ground plan, the section, how high, where the light is coming from, the view—all these things are in the drawing. No one can read it but us.” Dense, intense scratchings, these are the concentrated hieroglyphs from which the buildings will hatch, almost fully fledged, with only a few miles of working drawings (and the services of a dedicated engineer, Oskar Graf) between the mesmeric moment of conception and the final, full-scale realisation. Building, for Coop Himmelb(l)au, is a matter of proving whether they can retain the quality of the initial sketch.
“We call it the psychogram of the design: it contains all the feelings and emotions the building will awaken.”
What kind of feelings?
“There’s a good answer to that,” says Prix, smiling earnestly through his tinted spectacles. “It’s like asking a movie director to describe his film. If he could describe his film, there would be no necessity to make the film.”
A certain rapport has developed between him and Swiczinsky over the years. At times it sounds like a form of religious rapture, though Prix prefers a musical analogy. “Sometimes it’s like working in a band. Some of the ideas come from playing the guitar. The more you play, the more you hear.” By now, they communicate not only in words but . . . well, you could call it telepathically. “We’ve developed not only verbal communication, but also a body language, so a third person is excluded. We’re very fast. Sometimes I can describe the city just by doing this [points hands and fingers out] or this [crooks fingers] or this [embraces a yard of thin air].”
Looks like Milton Keynes to you? No: must be Melun-Sénart, satellite new town southeast of Paris, first fruit of the new calisthenic school of planning. Coop Himmelb(l)au won first place in the recent competition for a master plan for the city that will take well into the twenty-first century to come about. A series of (computer-aided?) drawings shows the major elements of the development. One can say with certainty that this is not the kind of thing Camillo Sitte would have recognised as town planning.
Prix offers an interpretation. There are some “circumstantial pressures,” such as the TGV (high-speed train) line running almost north–south past one edge of the site, and the existence of three other settlements. Aside from this, “We just thought of how a city should be, containing all the variety and discrepancy of cities: not only silent but noisy, not only high-density but low, not just cold but also hot. Otherwise it gets monofunctional.” His favourite cities are Vienna, New York, and LA, the latter “maybe because it’s nonphysical. The power of the city comes from travelling on the freeways and hearing twenty-one music stations.”
I venture a question of scale, since the Melun-Sénart plans appear to be conceived with minimal regard to the matter of eventual human occupation; the constituent parts have a logic on the page, as plan diagrams, but there is no guarantee that the “excitement” of their angles and curves will be borne out when blown up across the greenbelt of suburban Paris. “I don’t know what human scale is,” says Prix. “That’s an architectural term. I think the scale of a city is not a size, it’s an anticipation of human desires.”
Canonised in the MoMA show, and now popular travelling preachers (Prix gives a hundred-odd lectures a year, his American assistant tells me), Coop Himmelb(l)au has gained a cult following among students eager to escape the conventional limits of architecture. “For two thousand years we did architecture like this,” says Prix, scrawling a column-and-beam structure on a piece of trace. “Palladio, Vitruvius, additive things—this kind of architecture is dead. Architects are in a bad position against politicians and clients, so they’ve built up a certain philosophy. But we exclude all these clichés. In the 1970s, when we did the projects that were in the Deconstructivist Architecture show, we felt isolated. We thought it just couldn’t be true that the pomo stuff was in the brain of every architect. So we were glad to see people like Zaha Hadid and Danny Libeskind were around. There’s a kind of invention in all our projects. Otherwise it gets boring.”
“Open Architecture,” as practised by Coop Himmelb(l)au, is not the sort of thing destined to endear itself to civic building authorities, but it’s an uphill struggle which perhaps is beginning to be won: the practice was awarded the City of Vienna’s annual award for architecture in October, and its accomplishments are marked on the tourist board’s map of “Architektur vom Fin de siècle bis Heute,” alongside those of great uncles Otto, Adolf, Joseph, and Josef.
The pigeons swirl in Michaelerplatz, the limpid autumn sun gleams off the arbored globe of the Secession building, and against the great glory of Jugendstil Vienna, Coop Himmelb(l)au is just pie in the blue sky.