Word: hollein
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Hans Hollein bristles at being called a master of the exquisite small space. He denies that his architecture depends on perfect, peculiar details and even disagrees with the plain truth that his buildings are playful. It may be that Hollein, a Viennese, is habitually defensive about his work because so much of it has been both small scale and high end: jewelry stores, a travel agency, an art gallery. The quirky architect will not have to worry about professional stature any longer. Last week, a few days after his 51st birthday, Hollein was awarded the seventh annual Pritzker Architecture Prize...
...Hollein can use the money. He is not widely known. Relatively few of his designs have been built, and most of those were reconstructions and renovations. Some Pritzker jurors were concerned about his comparatively skimpy oeuvre. In the end, however, he was allowed a European handicap: on the Continent, there are not many opportunities for the expansive architectural gesture, and fewer buildings are being built than...
Denied the option of spreading his architectural imagination thin, Hollein has instead produced dense, intense buildings where every detail is fussed over and elaborately wrought. For one American admirer, Architect Michael Graves, the pleasure of a Hollein building comes from "the personal attention he gives his work. You truly sense the artist's hand controlling every detail." In fact, Hollein is also a gallery artist, but he finds praise like Graves' somewhat backhanded. "Exquisite craftsmanship and careful detailing are what an architect ought to be expected to deliver," Hollein says. "I don't think you should be applauded...
...Hollein has flouted the fetishes of dead-end, blank-box modernism--perhaps out of principle but perhaps also because he could not dream of bridling his ferocious drive to invent and surprise. He seems to create buildings with the spirit other architects might bring to an amusement park. His work at its best is lyrical and joyously jam-packed, smart and sensuous, like a Nabokov story. He believes buildings should even be erotic. In the first of two shops he designed for Schul- lin jewelers in Vienna--a plush, narrow space with an irregular fissure in the gleaming facade...