Transformations

TRANSFORMATIONS

Arts & Architecture, Los Angeles/CA., Mai 1966

The transformations and transpositions actually need no special explanation. They are charged with a multitude of meanings, there are many layers of a different significance as one's mind penetrates them, provoking a stream of associations.

It ranges from simple and direct use (as one project of the author to use oil-railroad cars for an open-air church or automobiles as elements for a house) to a more dramatic appeal to realize the potentialities of objects of modern technology and planning methods and carry them over into the field of architecture and city planning. From simple response to the beauty of form of true objects of the machine age to the sensations of estrangement, from atavistic symbol to transcendent dimension.

The Viennese architectural critic, Friedrich Achleitner, wrote:

"Hollein's transpositions are montages which can be partly realized on paper but partly also in actual reality. Thus a railroad car - by putting it on a base and through a change of scale - becomes a monument-. An air-craft carrier in the landscape becomes a city. It belongs to the nature of montage that not only something new comes into existence through the creation of unreal relations, but that also the objects themselves are changed, transformed. "
arts & architecture, May 1966