Pritzker Laureates Spotlight: Hans Hollein's Architecture as Art

This article continues our series exploring past Pritzker Prize winners throughout the years.

Hans Hollein received the Pritzker Prize in 1985. He was an architect and an artist, as well as a teacher, author, and designer of furniture and silverware. His projects ran from a candle shop only twelve feet wide to a major museum, and each got the same wit and attention. Few architects have made buildings so easy to enjoy.

Hollein was born in Vienna in 1934 and was drawing well from his first days at school. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, in Vienna in 1956. A Harkness Fellowship then took him to the United States, where he did graduate work at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and finished a Master of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley in 1960. Along the way he met and studied with Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Richard Neutra. Fellow Viennese architects Rudolph Schindler and Neutra had taken much the same route a generation earlier, through Chicago and Wright’s circle to California.

He kept a sense of humor about the trip. After learning that seven towns and cities in the United States are called Vienna, he visited every one of them in a second-hand Chevrolet. He later worked in architectural firms in Sweden and the United States before settling back in his native city.

The Pritzker jury called him “an architect who is also an artist,” one who “with wit and eclectic gusto draws upon the traditions of the New World as readily as upon those of the Old.” They also praised him as a teacher who urges the young to take big chances while keeping the work itself more important than the designer.

Notable Projects:

Retti Candleshop

Hollein’s first commission, in 1965, was a shop and showroom for Retti, a candle maker on a fashionable Vienna street. It was 12 feet wide, and Architectural Forum pointed out that this was smaller than most first commissions, and that it came with an enthusiastic client and a prominent address.

The shop made his name abroad and won him the $25,000 Reynolds Memorial Award. It was the first time in ten years that the prize had gone to a work costing less than the award itself. Progressive Architecture later called it “Hollein’s earlier masterpiece.” More commissions for specialized shops followed, and the candle shop stayed the one people pointed back to.

Schullin Jewellery Stores

Two jewelry stores for Schullin in Vienna came next, the first in 1974 and the second in 1983. Both drew international acclaim.

When Hollein completed the Richard Feigen Gallery in New York, Progressive Architecture praised his mix of “an architect’s sense of space with a goldsmith’s sense of craft.” The line suits the Schullin shops just as well. Both are interiors made for small, valuable objects, and both were designed by someone who clearly enjoyed the details.

Nearly a decade separates the two stores. He went on to design a shop for the Beck Company in New York’s Trump Tower.

Museum Abteiberg

The Municipal Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach, near Düsseldorf, was completed in 1982 and is among Hollein’s best-known commissions. By then his proposals and studies had grown well past shops into houses, apartment buildings, offices, and museums, and Abteiberg brought further acclaim and more projects of the same kind.

The momentum carried on. In 1985, the year of his Pritzker Prize, he won international competitions for the Museum Moderner Kunst in Frankfurt and a Cultural Forum in Berlin.

The Lasting Impact

Hollein’s work reached well past buildings. He designed furniture, products, and exhibitions.  His own artworks are held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, and the Municipal Museum in Mönchengladbach, among others.

Hollein was also a visiting professor at Yale University and Washington University in St. Louis, a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf, and head of the Institute of Design at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna. His honors included two Reynolds Memorial Awards, the City of Vienna’s Architecture Prize, the German Architecture Award, and the Austrian State Award for Environmental Design.

Architects today are often asked to design the exhibition, the furniture, and the brand experience along with the building. Hollein worked that way decades ago. He gave a twelve-foot shopfront and a museum the same seriousness, and kept the pleasure in both.