Architect Drawings : A Selection of Sketches by World Famous Architects Through History

Hollein, Hans (1934)
Museum in der Rock of the Mönchsberg Competition 1989, 1st prize, which became,
the Guggenheim Museum Salzburg 1990, 1989, Feasibility study and 2001 updating of project as
Art Center Monchsberg, 75.5 55.5cm, Pencil, crayon on transparent paper
The Pritzker Prize-winning architect Hans Hollein is also an artist and educator. His postmodern
building, the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt, launched his international reputation.
Born in Vienna, Hollein’s first architectural education was from the Academy of Fine Arts.
Receiving the Harkness Fellowship, he traveled to the United States, where he began his graduate
studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and graduated from the University of
California at Berkeley in 1960. Acquiring apprenticeship in Sweden and the United States, he began
his private practice in 1964.
Hollein has been continually involved in architectural education. He taught at the Academy of Fine
Arts in Düsseldorf from 1967 to 1976. Since then he has been a professor at the University of Applied
Arts in Vienna. He has taught as a visiting professor in such American universities as Washington
University and Yale University.
Hollein has completed many buildings including the Municipal Museum Abteiberg in
Monchengladbach near Düsseldorf (1983–1991); Haas House, Vienna (1985–1990); the Austrian
Embassy, Berlin (1997–2001); and Interbank, Lima (1996–2001). In addition to the Pritzker Prize in
1985, he was awarded the Grand Austrian State Prize in 1983 and the Chicago Architecture Award
in 1990.
The sketch illustrated here (Figure 8.13) is an early study for the Guggenheim Museum in Salzburg.
The project was initially designed in response to an architecture competition for a museum in the rock,
and was envisioned to connect the lower level of the Old Town with the plateau on top of the
Mönchsberg. The depression in the surface emits light into the lower public spaces, while the exhibit
rooms are artificially illuminated. In an area of Austria accustomed to mining, the tunneling permits an
unusual combination of rooms. As Hollein writes: ‘In contrast to conventional additive-tectonic forms
of construction, subtractive “building” into the rock allows more freedom, a plastic, more complex
spatial conception and expansion – a genuine three-dimensionality.’
The sketch exhibits these excavated paths which connect the skylit spaces and the entrance.
Rendered with pencil and crayon, the rock has been loosely pochéd to emphasize the outline of the
voids/passages. This describes the essence of the project, as Hollein writes: ‘The sketches show
exactly the total design of this project, which is also one of the project of creating space by subtraction.’
16 The freeform sketching technique of the underground spaces are in contrast to the more
carefully constructed lines of the architecture exposed to the exterior. Recognizing the freedom of
boring into the rock, the excavations were less confined and could be represented with more abstraction.
Two variations of the light shaft indicate that this sketch was preliminary. Hollein used colored
crayons to emphasize several of these details; the blue of the skylight and red for the opening in the
mountain’s depression.
The best method to visualize this building was through section sketches and drawings. Sections
more efficiently express the subtractive qualities of this design, showing the cuts into the rock and the
fit of the structure into the depression, called the ‘sunk.’ The section allowed Hollein to understand
the whole project, conceiving from the inside-out and viewing the distances between the spaces
which normally are studied in plan.
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