HANS HOLLEIN'S TV PERFORMANCE 'MOBILE OFFICE' (1969)
THE BECOMING DOMINANT
OF AN ORGANIZATION PARADIGM
Hans Hollein’s Mobile Office (1969)[2] has been catalogued as an installation consisting of PVC-foil, a vacuum cleaner, a typewriter (Hermes Baby), a telephone, a drawing board, a pencil, rubber and thumbtacks. In fact the Mobile Office is a two-minute-and-twenty-second-long performance exclusively produced for television. It paradigmatically shows contours of an emerging shift in architectural practice that must be read parallel to the radical transformations in the organization of labor in the Post-War years. It is exactly then that Fordist business organization in western industrialized countries, with its hierarchic structures, becomes fragile in favor of a new workers’ society. To read the Mobile Office as a paradigmatic project mirroring aspe cts of this very transformation allows me to understand alterations, shifts and disruptions in the practice of architecture. It allows me to identify and analyze contours of a possibly new emphasis in the work of an architect. It helps me to trace the implications for the work and the product of architects at the very moment of the alleged shift in western industrialized societies from a Taylorist organization of production towards today’s dominant form, the post-Fordist production of immaterial labor. Thus the analysis of the Mobile Office makes exemplarily visible the tendency towards today’s generalized and proletarized form of the creative entrepreneur and his or her production.
The transformation in the 1960s and 1970s of western industrialized societies from a Fordist model and its Taylorist organization of work processes towards a post-Fordist model and its becoming dominant of immaterial form of production has been widely discussed. Discourses in Gender and Queer Studies have described a transition from the mass worker to the laborer of society, Maurizio Lazzarato introduced the concept of immaterial labor, expanding the traditional Marxian concept of labor with a multitude of social productions, and finally it has been Mario Tronti who originally coined the notion of the Factory of Society, in which the formerly confined factory literally spills out into the city.
All of these descriptions imply the implementation of a popular and rather technocratic understanding of cybernetics as the core principle of governance into the work-processes of the Post-War years. It conceives of humans as well as machines and automats as autonomous, self-directing entities, whose behavior is understood as coded and thus as being able to be re-programmed. This is made possible by placing the emphasis on information flow within an organization that needs to be optimized. That is, cybernetic logic understands human beings as well as calculating machines and automats as equal entities on the same hierarchic level when it comes to processing information. Calculating machines and automats start to take over repetitive work-processes that are based on known information and routines that can be coded. Within this logic, workers need to take over work-processes that are based on a high degree of choice and on unknown information, which calculating machines, for the time being, cannot process. In this very moment, all the workers left in the factory or in the office get addressed as specialists—as a creative worker, or as a knowledge worker—who need to take on responsibility for his or her decisions within the organization of a corporation. Simultaneously, teamwork, and strict codes of conduct are being introduced in order to secure decision-making processes. This introduction of automation in the factory but also in administration (of companies and the state, on both sides of the iron curtain) has been accompanied by the popular promise of dismissing everybody in the near future into an everlasting spare time, the so-called leisure society.
In this sense the transition from Fordism to Post-Fordism in the 1960s and 1970s anticipates a contemporary condition in western industrialized societies of which the Factory of Society is its precise spatial metaphor. The old dictum of spatial and temporal simultaneity and concurrence of work processes, as well as the functionally distinct, well-defined attribution of spaces of production disintegrates with these new organizations of a labor concept that is becoming increasingly diffuse. Yet this new situation also produces a new kind of worker who adapts and affirms this new organization of labor: he and she need to exercise knowledge based on creative work, she and he become entrepreneurs and take up responsibility for what he or she is doing, no matter if one is still employed or has already been outsourced. Thus today’s modes, as well as means of production, not only require different spatial figurations for work that are permanently and continuously manifest in new and unprecedented formations and figurations, it also requires a different workers’ subject.
These alterations in the organization of work, accompanied with the popular promise of the leisure society to come, also affected architects and their objects in manifold ways. Noticeable in this context are the many avant-garde projects of the 1950s and 1960s in which labor seems already abolished and life is to circle around the play and self-organization of free subjects in their endless spare time. In this context Hans Hollein’s performance is very unique. With the Mobile Office Hans Hollein portrays himself as a new type of an architect, a new type of laborer in a new workers’ reality. Hollein anticipates that the new workers’ reality is not that of endless spare time, and not even the promised twenty-hour-week. Instead, life is full of work. In front of and with the TV-cameras on he challenges and alters various aspects of the traditional architect’s practice: be it the mode of appearance and performance of the architect; be it the drawing as the core of the work of an architect, as well as the status of the drawing itself; or finally be it the status, the representation and the organization of the architectural object. In a specific way the Mobile Office portrays the deferral of societies organizational and technological advancements against the bourgeois understanding of the work of the architect. Inasmuch as Hollein stages the transparent bubble as an envelope for working, and certainly not for leisure, he makes architecture visible, as a specific part of a palpable situation of a new formation of labor. In its presentation via television he relates significant and typical conditions of a nomadic living- and working-formation to architecture and its specific quality and materiality.
2:20 MINUTES
The 2:20-minute performance starts with a young Hans Hollein seesawing in a rocking chair. He wears a woolen pullover, a shirt and black trousers. Next to him on the floor, and behind him in the shelves, there are piles of books and print-outs. He explains: “The idea of the TO-CARRY-AROUND-HOUSE is derived from today’s way of living.” He goes on speaking about the modern nomad, the caravan, and his idea of the house that can be folded into a suitcase. CUT. A small propeller-driven aircraft rolls along an airstrip. In the far background Vienna’s 1964 Danube Tower with its radio- and television-masts looms into the summer sky. The cabin door is open. There is a pilot and two male passengers sitting in the aircraft. CUT. The airplane stands still. Both of the passengers get out of the plane. The one with long blond hair and sun-glasses is the 34-years old architect Hans Hollein. He wears a leather jacket, a white shirt and light-colored trousers, carrying a black suitcase. His bearded companion, Franz Madl, wears a white shirt and tie. He carries a wooden drawing board and a T-square. Both men head for the lawn next to the airstrip. CUT.
The suitcase is open. An alien-looking foil-like material glistens in the bright sunlight. The two men start to unpack and unfold the transparent textile. Hollein takes a black tube that is attached to a hoover-like apparatus suddenly lying around in the grass and attaches it to a latch of the textile. CUT. The textile is blown up to a slackish bubble. Hollein crawls into it. He squats in the bubble. His companion passes him the architect’s working utensils—the drawing board, the T-square and paper. Hollein closes the lid to the outside world and sits down in his bubble. Madl turns the apparatus to full volume. Now the bubble stands vertically, like a cigar. It is shiny and transparent. The voice over explains: “This all might sound somewhat crazy, but is already in use for sport facilities in other countries. For protection against the weather.” CUT. One sees the bubble with Hollein in close-up. Hans Hollein’s hair stands on end. Again an explanation from off screen: “Hollein once wrote: Today Architecture is in exile, on the moon or at the north pole, and all the people are building on and on, just houses, houses, houses, houses …” CUT.Hollein sits cross-legged in the bubble with the drawing board on his lap. His companion stands there curiously looking at him. The architect works in the bubble. He draws with ruler, triangle and pencil. CUT. One sees the same working position from a different angle. CUT. The camera frames a close-up of a telephone that suddenly stands there on the drawing board at Hollein’s lap. The telephone rings. Hollein picks it up and a dialog unfolds: “Hello, this is Hollein … Yes, I just arrived at the airfield Aspern … Yes, I just finished the house. It will be delivered at once. You can look at it in a second.” Now one sees the drawing that Hollein has produced: a small villa with a pitched roof, high chimney and a garden wall. In that very moment Hollein draws the smoke coming out of the chimney, telling his conversation partner on the phone: “Yes, a very modern design, yes. As you ordered … Good Bye.” CUT and a long shot. Music. The wide lawn; on the horizon a few bushes; a cloudless sky; to the left of the picture the hoover-like apparatus to which the bubble is attached; the envelope (hülle) nearly dissolves visually and is barely noticeable. Only through some interferences and shadows one can vaguely discern the bubble. Hollein still works by drawing. For a short moment he looks up from his work. CUT. Hans Hollein and his companion again sit in the small plane. This time Hollein will be the pilot and puts on the helmet…
Here the performance of the Mobile Office, or the TO-CARRY-AROUND-HOUSE, as it was called by Hans Hollein, ends. The performance was produced in the summer of 1969 as a part of a sequel about Hollein on the post-war TV series “Das österreichische Portrait” (The Austrian Portrait). The Mobile Office is a 2:20-minute segment in the 30-minute portrait of Hollein. It was aired in the early evening on the second Sunday in Advent the same year. Hollein does not represent his intimate space in its conventional meaning or by traditional means. Television allows for experimenting with a different form of representation of architecture, but also gradually shifts the role of the architect. With help of cameras, an architecture-drawing is produced that as exemplary depicts a nomadic, cosmopolitan workers’ future and its architecture. The architect himself plays different roles: he is the story-teller in the rocking chair; he is the young, dynamic working nomad; he is the architect with commissions all around the world. In this sense the Mobile Office is an architecture of information and its message is being transported through a new medium, the television.
THE ENTREPRENEUR VIRTUOSO
AND HIS SPACE
The half-hour portrait constructs Hollein’s sentimental relationship to tradition-steeped Vienna and to Austria as a whole. It constructs a proximity to his revolutionary ideas, as they would be called, to the history of Austria and its architecture, but also to the cozy way of living of the long-gone imperial-metropolis Vienna, to the horse carriages, to the Riesenrad Ferris wheel, etcetera.
The cornerstones of his biography are told as follows. He was born and raised in the fourth district of Vienna, where he still lives with his wife. He went to school in the neighborhood, then he studied architecture at Clemens Holzmeister’s master-class at the Academy of Fine Arts at Schillerplatz. After graduating, he worked in Sweden and then did his master’s degree in architecture in America, in California. With the refurbishment of the candle shop Retti he became famous. And now he is a professor in Düsseldorf, Germany. At the same time he is about to build a bank in Vienna, as well as a gallery on 79th Street in New York City. He is working on a project for the World’s Fair in Osaka, Japan and on a project for Olivetti in Amsterdam. At the beginning of the sequel, Hollein is being introduced as the creative architect who thinks beyond the norm(al): “I am not the kind of architect who only build,” he says. “I am interested in miscellaneous … Also commercials and things like that. I present products. I am something of an idea man.” (0:39)[3] In other words, he is a virtuoso, always a bit crazy, visionary, but still pragmatic, always interested in finding solutions for problems.
Hollein stages himself as a kind of hybrid working subject: he is the cosmopolitan entrepreneur and he is an outstanding creative worker. Yet he is goal-oriented and lives a stable life. He works on a multitude of projects of different scales around the world. Still, he also works in teams. He collaborates, for example, with his wife, who is an haute-couture designer, and designed the costumes and suits for the Austrian Pavilion at the Milan Triennale exhibition in 1968. Hollein is not only an architect. He is also a designer of objects, an art-director and an artist. But he is also an entrepreneur: he is active and self-employed, he is innovative.
To borrow a term coined by the German sociologist Ulrich Bröckling Hans Hollein shows first contours of the enterprising self.[4] Published in 2007, Bröckling takes up today’s general imperative that everybody ought to become an entrepreneur. He analyses the societal maelstrom and its discursive diagram that this imperative had released. He speaks of the normative requirements, but also about new choices and opportunities, the institutional arrangements, and about the social- and self-technologies that regulate the behavior of the enterprising self. In doing so, he lays out a grammar of governing and self-governing, describing the currents that carry people away, circumscribing the dynamic of an increasingly economized society.
To read Hollein as an enterprising self emphasizes an otherwise underexposed relation between architecture and economic discourses that go beyond a discussion about building norms and the economic framing that restrains the architect’s creativity. Rather, this reading takes into account that the architects, himself and herself, are enmeshed in societal discourses. He and she are shaped by a dominant economic logic and its imperatives. Yet he and she also act upon this logic by affirming the situation and responding to it.
In general terms the modern architect’s work is based on a bourgeois mode of work that primarily comprises communication and produces value by applying knowledge and exchanging services. This is true for two distinct modes of work within the practice of architecture. On the one hand there has always been the architect-entrepreneur. He—as the traditional history of architecture discourse primarily knows males—has always been discussed as a singular master and public intellectual. This part of the practice of architecture is a mode of productivity that today can be described with the neologism networking. On the other hand, the work of the architect, or more precisely of the many collaborators and co-workers of the architect-entrepreneur, pursue a more mundane activity, that of the drawing and constant re-drawing of endless variations of a façade, a layout, a section, or a detail of a building. This is the production of communication material for clients, the public, but not least for other professionals involved in the production of the built environment.
Thus, in the words of Maurizio Lazzarato describing the general concept of immaterial labor, the work of the architect, as it is generally understood, needs to be considered to be a specific form of labor that “produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity.”[5] Lazzarato refers to changes in companies in the industrial and tertiary sector itself, where skills needed for labor processes increasingly involved skills in cybernetics and the control of computers. On the other hand, he points towards intellectual activities that normally were not recognized as work but generally were understood as the privilege of the bourgeoisie and its children that in the Post-War years have become part of the domain that has been defined as “mass intellectuality.” Lazzarato argues that these profound changes not only modified the organization of production, but also the function of intellectuals towards a generalization of their activities.
The Mobile Office depicts the value-creating form of practice generally known as architecture. Yet it radicalizes the traditional understanding of the work of the architect, as well as its product. On the one hand it is the public figure of the architect-entrepreneur, one who networks, that merges with the architect-worker, who produces drawings. Thus the performance of theMobile Office depicts an act of labor whose purpose lies in itself. It is a work-process that solely exists through communication. In that sense it is work that produces an object, which cannot be isolated from its performance (handeln),[6] as the Italian philosopher Paolo Virno had described it. It is not so much about knowledge- and information-based work in its original meaning, where knowledge would present a kind of product, but it is rather labor in that it finds its compliance and its purpose in itself. It is structured like a musician playing a concert. Virtuosity, that is the practice that was formerly attributed exclusively to the artist, has become a generalized category that implies the presence of others. Today we find its generalized form in various guises within the culture industry, in consulting, in information-technologies, in design and advertising, in tourism and finance, as well as in entertainment and research.
Yet there is also a spatial aspect that closely correlates with this kind of labor performance of the Mobile Office. As Paolo Virno furthermore pointed out, post-Fordist immaterial labor takes on the traditional characteristics of political acting (politische Handlung). It has become a prerequisite to expose oneself to the gaze of the other. And this requires a space that is structured like the public. Metaphorically speaking, it is in the space of television where Hollein appears in order to make his spectacle public. At the same time, one needs to recognize that although the space of television is structured like the public, as is the stage for the musician in a concert, there is a traditionally distinct border or boundary between the one performing and the audience looking. The architecture of the stage produces, simply, a distance. For Virno this distance is being abolished in the new organization of labor. The monologue-character of work disappears and the relationship to the other becomes the constitutive prerequisite for labor that from now on needs to get along without a script. Yet as an architect, Hollein emphasizes the very need of distance in the performance itself, but also explicitly in the design and use of the bubble. By pragmatically anticipating the new workers’ reality he produces architecture for this very situation out of his own experience.
The workplaces of the young architect are “his flat … on the way to his building sites, the airplane, and his third work-place is his atelier.” (12:55) His workplaces have no boundaries: his office is not only everywhere and mobile but also extended—living and working become one. The atelier, the airplane, and his flat need to allow all different programs, and a multitude of functions; they are all workplaces and places for living at the same time. Hollein lives and works anywhere, be it in his rocking chair or in his transparent pneumatic construction. The space for living and space for working converge.
Despite and exactly because of the convergence, the pneumatic bubble is an architectonic prototype of a new paradigm of a creative, entrepreneurial subject: the soft and cuddly sphere isolates the architect from his or her immediate surroundings. It produces an insular indoor climate in which the worker is immersed and thus—no matter where—becomes active, and is only then able to work. In other words the bubble is—as design—the precondition for nomadic and precarious modes of working, modulating itself, as Hollein points out, from place to place. As a kind of outstanding element, the iconic design affects in a double way: on the one hand, the bubble is its own metaphor. It is its own thought bubble and represents the absolute monadic enclosure of the working subject. The bubble is not functionally determined; it is not a production space for a group of people but decidedly an ironically over-subscribed prototypic single-work-place of a boundless, world-spanning daily grind.
It is a technologically feasible and socially conceivable vision that Hollein presents on television. The above-mentioned two-minute clip that represents the Mobile Office is part of a series of utopias at the end of the 1960s that, as the art-historian and art critic Helmut Draxler states, are composed by technological and social utopias. Draxler argues that the pre-condition of these projects had been a stable and secure economic prosperity attributable to Keynesian economic policy. Next to technological and constructive innovations, this was accountable for conceiving feasible utopias for the near future—but not so much utopias of hope and salvation.[7]
The Mobile Office is a decidedly pragmatic vision of a workers’ society. Hollein uses everyday objects that are—more or less—trivial and petty items accompanying a modern life in 1969, emphasizing and demonstrating the normalcy and actuality of the project. In using these objects in a twisted way, he then also asserts their difference: the Hoover as compressor, the airplane as everyday vehicle, the suitcase to transport one’s own dwelling, or the mobile phone. The portable bubble in which Hollein sits and works is introduced on television as something that everybody is familiar with in a more conventional form: the trailer, the caravan. Still the Mobile Office is not architecture in a conventional sense, but is part of a series of early projects of Hollein’s that deal with the radical extension of the concept of architecture and design. By using and adopting artistic means and strategies, Hollein reacts to various social (but also technological) developments to make them, on the one hand, visible, and on the other hand, possible to pursue and research, to extend and radicalize by means of architecture and design. The projects Extension to the University of Vienna (1960), the architecture capsule series Nonphysical Environmental Control Kit (1967), or the space-spray Svobodair (1968, with Peter Noever), to name just a few, deal with media and immaterial aspects of a man-made environment as architecture. Instead of built architecture, Hollein conceives an immaterial architecture of pure affect—a kind of exceeding atmospheric simulation: the TV-set as extension to the university, the Architecture pill to construct a non-physical environment, or, in collaboration with the Austrian office-furniture producer Svoboda, a spray that immediately changes the workers atmosphere as a revolutionary way to improve the office.
These projects illustrate Hollein’s singular approach to architecture, which is about architecture as system and therefore goes beyond the three-dimensional object, extending the concept of architecture and design that he also emphasizes in his famous manifest-like text Alles ist Architektur (All is Architecture). The Mobile Office traces Alles ist Architektur in its full radicalism. In doing so it takes up a moment that Craig Buckley observes in his discussion of Hollein’s manifesto:
Between these images one begins to pick up an alternate repetition present in the manifesto, one that shifts from the image of the body to its extensions. Citing the “telephone booth,” the “helmets of jet pilots,” and the “development of space capsules and space suits,” the expansion of the human environment proceeds by becoming smaller, departing from a “building of minimal size extended into global dimensions” to approach the contours of the subject. The dynamic of extension and contraction stretches the paradoxically inclusive logic of the manifesto, which expands architecture to be identified with all things but regrounds this manifold in one thing: architecture.[8]
The Mobile Office takes up the postulation that everything could be architecture, and returns to architecture. In contrast to all immaterialized experiments, the Mobile Office is tangible architecture. The inflatable bubble is a radical design for a nomadic work-life that is able to modulate itself from place to place. It is a hybrid object between the arts: it is architecture, it is installation. And, most importantly, it is being broadcast on television—it is pure communication.
published in:
Peggy Deamer (2015): The Architect as Worker, Bloomsbury Academic, LondonREFERENCES
[1] This research was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): P 22448-G21
[2] Other examples that I discuss elsewhere are: the Invention of Office-Landscaping by Eberhard and Wolfgang Schnelle, the Fun Palace by Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood, Herman Hertzberger’s Centraal Beheer, or the Bed-In Performance by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. See Andreas Rumpfhuber, Architektur immaterieller Arbeit [Architecture of Immaterial Labor],(Vienna: Turia und Kant, 2013). Open Access Version: http://www.oapen.org/search?keyword=rumpfhuber.
[3] The numbers in brackets depict the timecode of the DVD I received from the Austrian Broadcasting Company, ORF Kundendienst, that was broadcast on 7 December 1969. See: Dieter O. Holzinger, “Das österreichische Portrait,” DVD Archivs des Österreichischen Rundfunks ORF, 2008. Hollein’s original statement is, “Ich bin nicht so ein Architekt der nur baut. Mich interessiert Verschiedenes. Auch die Werbung und dergleichen. Ich mache Produktvorschläge. Ich bin so etwas wie eine Idea-Man.”
[4] See: Ulrich Bröckling, Das unternehmerische Selbst, Soziologie einer Subjektivierungsform (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), particularly chapter 3.2.
[5] Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labour,” in Radical Thought In Italy: A Potential Politics, Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
[6] Paolo Virno, Grammatik der Multitude (Wien: Turia and Kant, 2005), 67. Italian original edition, 2001.
[7] Helmut Draxler, Die Utopie des Designs, Ein archäologischer Führer für alle die nicht dabei waren, exhibition catalogue (Kunstverein München: 1994, no pagination).
[8] Craig Buckley, “From Absolute to Everything: Taking Possession in ‘Alles ist Architektur,’” Grey Room 28 (Summer 2007): 114.
[9] Hans Hollein, Alles ist Architektur: “Physisch und psychisch wiederholt, transformiert, erweitert [der Mensch] seinen physischen und psychischen Bereich, bestimmt er ›Umwelt‹ im weitesten Sinne.”
[10] See: Juliane Rebentisch, Ästhetik der Installation (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2003),55f.
INSTANTANEOUS
PROGRAMMING
In his texts, Hollein stresses the effects of architecture, the impact that the environment has on people. For him this environment is always already man-made, in his sense, an artificial environment. In Alles ist Architektur he would describe a topologic situation: men and women are part of an environment that they themselves construct, but it conditions every single one of them, as well as society (the individual is always and already part of a group, a society). At the same time, people act on this environment; they extend it and re-create new artificial environments. Thus Hollein writes: “Again and again, physically and psychologically, the human being extends his physical and psychological area, affects his environment in the broadest sense.”[9]
Thus, the vast plane on which the bubble is staged is already constructed as an environment made by people and implies already all (cybernetic) world-spanning infrastructure. The field is an open, extensive plane that is not yet functionally determined, yet is equipped with all the technology needed to blow up a bubble or to plug in a telephone. Furthermore, it neither follows a visible grid, nor has a quantitative, observable order. The infrastructure and its knots are just there, they are assumed, do not require highlighting, or even definition. They are just there, as Hollein would relate: “… and everywhere … I can blow up this thing.” (09:35)
The bubble is the extreme version of an enclosed minimal-environment. It is, in Hollein’s terms, a better contemporary dwelling, architecture that goes beyond mere function, that assures physical protection but also offers psychic shelter and at the same time acts as a symbol. It is a kind of architecture that is, on the on hand, an apparatus that isolates one from inhospitable (man-made) ambiances, as do the space suit and the space capsule, and at the same time it also allows for communication with others far away. It is an architecture that adapts itself to every single place.
As an envelope conceived for an individual, the pneumatic construction actualizes itself in each and every situation and with each new program. It is, in a two-fold way, programmatically open. Firstly, it is its relationality towards the outside. It ideally can constantly adapt itself to its context, as Hollein emphasizes. Secondly, it is in itself a functionally open interior. Depending on its use, the portable house—as Hollein would call his design in the 1969 television broadcast—becomes a nomadic dwelling or a workplace, finally becoming the Mobile Office. Similar to simple objects of minimal art—as the German philosopher Juliane Rebentisch points out—that are continuously readable as thing and as sign, that addresses the observer not only as producer of meaning, but at the same time always already subverts the production of meaning,[10] the bubble of the Mobile Office allows a constant programming of the functions of its space.
The dwelling becomes what one uses it for. In the specific case of the TV performance it becomes a workplace—the Mobile Office. If Hollein had slept in it, it would be probably known today as the “Mobile Bedroom.” The bubble’s distinct quality is to adapt itself to every situation, as the contemporary worker needs to adapt himself or herself to every situation. The design takes up the dictum of a continuously required adaptability, of an architecture of maximized flexibility. But the design does not simply produce a flexible object that adapts itself to functions that are assigned in advance, but, more in the spirit of structuralism, it produces an object without attributes, that, depending on use, is in the process of becoming.
With his design of the Mobile Office Hollein affirms a specific situation in which the modern, flexible, working nomad is thrown out into the inhospitable, sheer endless spaces of non-places (to use a phrase from Marc Augé) that is part of an even larger infrastructure that guarantees the same standards worldwide. Hollein’s design, however, withdraws from an idea of efficiency that would describe space through a dense catalogue of requirements, and creates an object, that is—due to its material qualities and due to its figuration—able to house a multitude of programs. At the same time the practice of the architect alters in order to become performative: be it the acting out of the architect himself or herself, or be it the drawing.