Plottegg —Architecture beyond Inclusion and Identity is Exclusion and Difference from Art Plottegg — Architecture beyond Inclusion and Identity is Exclusion and Difference from Art

002 003 Plottegg —Architecture beyond Inclusion and Identity is Exclusion and Difference from Art

004 Contents

007 Introduction by Joseph Giovannini Plottegg: “I’m not a designer, I just change rules”

025 Works

271 Appendix List of Works Solo and Group Exhibitions Books Selected Contributions to Books Selected Contributions to Magazines Selected Lectures Selected Reviews on Plottegg’s Work Thanks to Copyrights Publisher’s Note

284 Biography Manfred Wolff-Plottegg

287 Readme1st

007 Introduction

by Joseph Giovannini

Plottegg: “I’m not a designer, I just change rules”

During his forty years of practice, and even as a student before then, Austrian architect Manfred Wolff-Plottegg has waged a disruptive career, deploying inversions of logic, reversals of expectations, transpositions of rules, and irresistible subversions of unmis- takably Duchampian charm, all to question the field, dislocate its basic assumptions, and advance it to a fresh state of self-confrontational awareness. With scant institutional support and little company, this solitary agent provocateur has conducted an on-going critique of the field from its margins, creating eddies of disturbance that have disrupted and influenced the mainstream from the edges. He mounted a career of change. As he entered the field and the dialogue in the 1970s, architecture everywhere was moving toward a paradigm shift, and his research and advocacy contributed to the larger shift. As a student, Plottegg staged events and installations that he documented photographically, one-man/single-act spectacles that echoed the détournements espoused by the Situationists in France to disrupt the routines that deaden daily life: his, and their, technique was to inject unexpected swerves into everyday situations to make the familiar suddenly unfamiliar. Even if professors and students were his only audience, Plottegg swerved architectural expectations, both as a matter of conviction and tempera- ment. He was not a creature of convention but was driven by both prin­ciple and attitude. Rooting early, his inventive and disruptive way of thinking congealed into a pattern and then a modus operandi, taking many forms during his career. Soon after the Graz University of Technology, he moved the art of the unexpected to galleries,

008 009 museums, public spaces and into competitions, as his acts of calibrated resistance drew Students found themselves confronting mixed messages as they prepared an audience and even a clientele. Many of his installations, interventions and specula- for a field whose basis was being challenged and undermined. In Austria, as in many tions amounted to intellectual parables that embodied an idea or a position. The national architectural cultures, many architects and students staged installations provo­cations usually elicited a smile in what were, on some level, genial versions of against what was then considered the heroic Modernism of the movement’s founding Ghandhian acts of passive resistance. fathers, in what was essentially an Oedipal reaction during the 1960s and 1970s to The pattern assumed a whole new level of seriousness when he applied theory that had become theology. The disputes were often mounted by small one-man his counterintuitive logic to architecture conceived on the computer. What had practices, and they were not orchestrated but happened episodically outside any linear been disruption by concept became disruption by the new technology. He was early to historical progression. the table when he theorized the computer’s potential impact on the design process. Plottegg’s restive provocations occurred in the transitional period during The computer did not create an either/or choice between the analog and digital worlds the breakdown of an older paradigm shifting to new, as yet-undetermined ground. but a both/and that bridged them. Architecture’s collective unconscious was restructuring itself. A gentle rather than angry subversive who tended to humor rather than Plottegg staged his events at a time when Austrian architects such as Coop strident orthodoxy, Plottegg has been one of the most productive, original and serious Himmelb(l)au, Haus-Rucker-Co, and Zünd-Up participated in a critique called Actionism minds of his generation, always encouraging radical ways of theorizing the field. He (Aktionismus), that formed an Austrian tributary into the broader international streams of never proposed a totalizing manifesto that packaged a new architecture within a single the newly emergent cultural postmodernism (not co-extensive with architecture’s idea. Early on he deployed catastrophe theory to precipitate new alignments; he used “historical post-modernism”). Architects participating in the devel­opment, along with mirrors to challenge perspective, and then the computer to do the same; he speculated artists and polemicists, initiated critiques in the form of manifestoes, installations, on randomness as a means of erasing the signature of the architect; he hypothesized performances, and interventions. In Graz Plottegg was a one-man island, perhaps, but a self-catalytic architecture; he looked at buildings as lenses through which to see and an island within a larger archipelago that stretched beyond Vienna to London and act in the world differently. to the U.S., forming an inchoate body of protest against the status quo. Not one critique, Plottegg saw differently because he thought differently. No single idea whatever its form, said it all, but collectively the critique established an irreversible dominated his discourse. His continuously evolving critique kept his own theoretical momentum contesting the received wisdom and practice of Modernism. After the stu- positions off balance without ever coalescing into a single point of view. His parables dent events of 1968, whose cultural effects rippled across the continent for years during were all about non-linearity. In a century characterized by scientific, social and political politicized and radicalized times, the avant-garde de-architecturalized the reigning uncertainty, he eschewed the determinism of closed systems in favor of open systems, Modernist epistemology in order to de-structure, open and invade it. The field was atom- opting out of “normal” Newtonian physics that packaged everything neatly in favor ized, redefining itself. of the quantum physics of Heisenberg, in which the universe is based on probabilities. Plottegg, a natural radical, was a student of the zeitgeist, but his attitude He steered clear of the idea that something must last forever, including the Platonic belonged to his character as well as in his youth. Long after others defected to more con- essentialism of modernism. He has spent a career opening architecture as a system of ventional practices, culturally and professionally absorbed, or dropped out al­­together, thought rather than closing it with fixed rules, lasting truths and single-issue definitions. Plottegg persisted. Graz itself was a active nexus in the cultural and architectural Such was the intensity of his inventive proposals that they never became boxes of new debates, and Plottegg’s proposals, part and parcel of the scene there, persisted long after constraints built around the boxes he broke. the scene subsided. His experiments continued in Graz and elsewhere. The young Turk remained a Turk. Plottegg was a student at the Technical University in the late 1960s and early 1970s at a time when Modernism was being questioned. Modernism as received from the Bauhaus, Intimations of architectural uncertainties appeared early in Plottegg’s career when, in and as it descended from Hoffmann and Loos, was being challenged—as was what 1972, for a course in furniture design at the Graz University of Technology, he collapsed Plottegg called the “fascist” systems theories of the 1960s, which separated functions to a bed: he set up conditions to precipitate a spontaneous breakdown “without even optimize efficiency. Architectural historicism was also on the horizon. thinking.” In the context of the architectural critiques emerging in Austria, Plottegg was shifting the subject from Modernism’s emphasis on structure and function to the subject of the sensation at the moment of collapse and the aftermath. Rather than a

010 011 mono-functional bed, form following function, as in a single or double, or a Hollywood More locally, the Viennese architect Hans Hollein designed a series of “heart” bed or one that vibrates, Plottegg was proposing a hybrid bed whose unpredict- small shops in Vienna (and New York) that galvanized the field, with tightly focused able deformation would provoke unpredictable functions. Plottegg advocated collapse storefronts and interiors that were jewel-like in their precision, detail and unexpected because it was not a reflective process determined a priori by expressions of language, strangeness. These micro-projects proved that small projects could dislocate the field images or theory, but by a direct and spontaneous (though somewhat manipulated) and have an impact disproportionate to their size. action-event. The originally neutral surface of the bed acquired, after collapsing, a diver- It is a peculiarity of Plottegg’s career and personality that he dared look sified and intense topography that Plottegg (coyly) said could be activated by the new in places and building types that no one else had bothered exploring. Over several seating and sleeping positions its forms encouraged. He was not simply multiplying­ years, Plottegg remodeled a series of common bathrooms that he transformed into functions, as with a Swiss army knife, which is multifunctional (but with only one func- provocative theses, despite the rather tight quarters and unexpected venues. That they tion at a time), but a hybrid bed in which different functions can take place at the same were bathrooms, with toilets, was part of the rub, part of the frictive environment of time on a topography that suggests different, perhaps new uses. “I’m not designing, I’m Duchampian thought. not thinking, I’m acting,” he said, referring to the tenets of Actionism. In the first, done in 1982, Plottegg tiled a bathroom in black and white His beginnings, then, are highly independent and teasingly naughty, a com- stripes angling in different directions, setting up a conflict of directions and vectors: the plex attitude that has continued since. The naughtiness, however, was not gratuitous: room zigged this way, then that, then in another direction. The washbasin was set up he always pursued a point, and a serious point, in his investigations. Tellingly, with the in a corner, off the orthogonal, and an angled, leaning, segmented glass wall adjacent bed, he ceded control over the outcome. to the tub further contributed to a spatial conflict that verged on unintelligibility. The In a related installation done about the same time, Metamorphosis of a Town optics denied any vanishing point in this otherwise long, orthogonal room, and basically Flat, Plottegg draped a water-resistant tarp over conventional furniture in a conventional brought the background forward. Still, the bathroom functioned, even after losing room, forming a substratum of soil for an interior terrarium. The installation recalled spatial coherence: it was no less efficient or sanitary, but the optical manipulation of the work of land artists, who eschewed galleries, and the conceptual installations of the zebra patterns ushered it into the world of ideas. artists like Walter De Maria, who did earth rooms in Germany and New York in the late In his next bathroom, For K. Schwitters, Plottegg brought spatial confusion to 1960s and 1970s. a frenzy by angling mirrors, some shaped in forced perspective, which in their totality The term “design” derives from the Italian verb segnare—“to sign”—and created a fun-house effect of compounded illusions. Whereas Schwitters fragmented the implies the hand and signature of the artist. By allowing the bed to collapse in a pur- object, Plottegg fragmented space, which was no longer a whole. “Here no form follows posely uncontrolled “design” process, and by foresting an interior landscape, Plottegg function,” he says. “By removing the right angles and destroying the parallelism of was abjuring design and signature, as well as Modernism’s formalist mantras of point, the walls, you can no longer make out the shape and size of the room.” It was his first line and plane and its ur-subjects, space, form and materials. Collapsing the bed changed Deconstructivist work. the subject from form and function to concept, and from abstraction to narrative: the A year later, in 1984, he took the fringe that normally sways like a hoola bed acquired content and story. Already in 1972, he was falling into the Duchampian skirt in a car wash and adapted it to the top of a helmet so that a motorcyclist wearing it camp that offered a critique of Modernism that differed from Robert Venturi’s critique, resembled a Roman centurion. He then took it to the rear window of a car, and then Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, first published in 1966, which emphasized to a bathroom where one fringe hid the toilette and others closed the door: a different language, sign and meaning. Their respective complexities differed. kind of body was being washed in a different context. The meaning of the fringes There was, at the time, a larger international context for the collapse of migrated, depending on context. He would later elaborate on this idea of changing Plottegg’s bed. In the 1960s, artists were cultivating destruction. Gordon Matta Clark is meaning and function when, on screen, building parts floated in his computer as they perhaps the most famous of the artist/architects to take apart a found object: trained took on different roles, depending on their scale, position and context. as an architect but practicing as a sculptor in what Rosalind Krauss called “the expanded The rule, or algorithm, was to take something with a specific use in one field,” he specialized in destroying buildings with surgical cuts, and then photograph­ ­ context and transpose it to another. Algorithms were simply rules that worked in the ing the results. In the late 1960s, the New York artist, Barry Le Va, dropped planes analog as well as the digital worlds. The idea of transposing contexts became a poster of glass from various heights in installations where the shattered planes resting on the image many years later when he tapped into the issue of extreme sports by photo shop- floor were the art piece. ping himself ironing his own pant leg in the context of a steep Alpine cliff.

012 013 These small speculations, done in the privacy of domestic bathrooms, castle a new spirit of levity and to re-contextualize the building through his interven- would see a more public expression when Plottegg realized an installation for the tions. He was finding new urinals to sign. Austrian Railroad in 1983 to redesign the long, narrow interior of a rail car. Deploying In the main entry hall, with massive arches and vaults springing from mirrors at angles and setting them among angled walls, Plottegg broke the dominating thick pillars, Plottegg immediately set his agenda with a reception desk that destabilized linearity with angled views that scrambled the space and virtually widened the car, the space with illusion. Projecting the diagonal form of a propeller from crossing vault now transformed into a Kurt Schwitters environment on wheels. In a concrete exercise lines of the ceilings above, he constructed a soffit that he turned and duplicated below in the phenomenology of perception, he reshaped the normally long, narrow space. at the reception desk, all of it veiled by planes of sliding glass set at an angle that faintly In the bathrooms and then the railroad car Plottegg deployed simple mirror the surrounding space. The scissoring angels of the desk and soffit above are, design moves to create a non-linear, multi-directional space that did not add up to the in combination, difficult to grasp, unintelligible at a glance but mesmerizing. They set Renaissance wholes created in the perspectival world of his architectural ancestors. a new, lighter, transformative tone and disruptive agenda for the whole castle as one These three bathrooms broke the normal conventional understanding of orthogonal enters: the design does not deliver the shock of a Surrealist, out-of-place image but the space and ushered space into a relativity of parts in shifting relationships. less confrontational approach of an anecdotal environment of individual moments Destabilizing the space, setting it into relational movement as the user that do not add up to a totalizing look or concept. walked through space, amounted to a disruption of architecture’s foundational pre- Downstairs, Plottegg, the master of bathrooms, set urinals directly against sumption of framed, static space. the rough bedrock walls of the underground rooms, the jagged rock contrasting with In these small self-initiated projects for himself and friends and then the smooth forms of the white porcelain fixtures. A floor-to-ceiling mirror set at an angle for Austrian Rail, Plottegg challenged not only the wholeness of Renaissance space but adds an element of spatial confusion by reflecting the ceiling and upending the space. also the permanence of structure, spatial integrity and even meaning. Unlike most A half-dozen rolls of toilet paper are arrayed on the wall of the toilet chamber, all out of Modernists, he was not boiling meaning down to a single and immutable thing: reach from the toilet. Sliding glass doors with jagged edges were designed to part and he was not a Platonist of space, not an essentialist. He multiplied possibilities beyond then come back together in a perfect fit. Likewise the wavy edges of the sliding glass exit essences. Back in 1983, he already set spaces off into a new building block of uncertainty, doors pocket into each other’s curves perfectly when closed: apart, they look untamed. long before Deconstructivism had become a word. The two doors are bracketed by two truncated flights of stairs that dead-end in a low-fly- ing ceiling vault, staircases to nowhere. Symmetrical and well behaved, if absurd, they Many architectural commissions start with an existing building that must be renovated are a comment on the dubious logic of symmetry so often blindly applied. or otherwise transformed. Plottegg has worked on many commissions that involve exist- But perhaps the most disruptive and character-changing intervention is ing structures, but rather than simply treating the brief narrowly, he often conceives at the entrance, where instead of hinging the pair of doors on the sides of the door of the building as an objet trouvé, to be transformed with a concept and not simply to be frame, Plottegg hinged the doors at the floor. In this case, however, each door is half “improved.” Duchamp worked with urinals; Plottegg worked with bathrooms; in larger a staircase, and when the two pivot up into position, their steps mesh forming a projects, his conceptual interventions transform the building, changing the subject from solid double “French” door. Plottegg changed the rule, or algorithm, of the door: the function alone to function wrapped in a concept wrapped in a joke. Form and beauty swivel axes are horizontal instead of vertical, and the doors form stereometric bodies are not the issue. He elevates the commission to another level. instead of flat door leaves. In 1988 Plottegg, in collaboration with Andreas Gruber, was given the Plottegg documented it all with cameras fixed according to another change commission to renovate and revitalize Trautenfels, an imposing baroque palace set on a of rules: he attached cameras to movable components. Instead of a camera held by a base of ramparts in the district of Liezen in Styria, a state in southeast Austria. The castle photographer by hand or on a tripod, he taped cameras to the parts of the building that had belonged to the Styrian Youth Hostel Association and was being converted into move or swing, such as the entrance door, the edge of the toilet seat, the handle of a museum. The masonry structure, as a given, was a massive, immoveable object, with the door, and the elevators. The point of view by which the building is “seen” was com- vaulted interiors and notable Renaissance and Baroque frescoes painted in some of pletely displaced from the user, breaking the hold of perspectival expectation on the its grand chambers. Plottegg’s strategy was punctual, to create interventions at strategic eye in favor of unexpected viewpoints that challenged and changed the understanding points, as though “treating” the heavy building by acupuncture. In the context of the and experience of the space. heavily restored interior, the sum total of all his interventions was to give the imposing

014 015 Not only did Plottegg conceive buildings differently. He perceived them Plottegg’s turn to the computer was early and decisive. He was fusing the disruptive differently. He was dislocating architecture’s foundational principles, the perspectival power of asymmetrical conceptual thinking to the disruptive capacity of new technology. point of view, with the cone of vision emanating from the viewer. But he went about it He was one of the few of his generation to embrace the computer holistically, not just as “mildly, lightly, unimportantly,” as Duchamp once said of his attitude about making art. a drafting tool. All these interventions added up to a transformative commentary that light- Early on, starting in the 1980s, he theorized how screen space and com- ened the character of a prepossessing, rather self-serious building with a heavy history. putational logic affected how architecture could be actually conceived rather than just The building acquired a new energy. But besides their quizzical and quietly humorous drawn. Most architects using the computer predicated its use as a drafting table and character, the interventions undercut the agenda of stability and the aura of authority of parallel rule, as though they were still manipulating instruments by hand. Conventional a governmental structure. Plottegg’s interventions destabilize space, form and symmetry. software was designed to “paint” realistic representations, complete with shadows, The desk, sited between the scissoring forms of the propeller above and below, question light sources and surface reflections. He understood that software was overlooking the space caught in a moment of sheer, an effect enhanced by the filmy veils of glass. The potential of the computer itself, and that the computer had a logic and capacity beyond mirror in the bathroom upends the otherwise ordered space in the room. The double its ability to draft and represent. French doors at the entrance pivot on a diagonal through the classically decorated and Plottegg reasoned that if the science of perspective once revolutionized vaulted arcade, and challenge the surrounding static orthogonal order not only by architecture, the logic of the computer dislocated the perspectival understanding their geometry but by the very fact that they move in an unexpected way. He loosened of space within a revolution of its own. “With computers, we don’t have rules—contrary the hold of geometric authority on a building so that it was no longer controlling. His to hand-drawn drawings, the computer has no scale or meaning and lines don’t have techniques of destabilization released the totalizing effects of architecture. For Plottegg, functions.” So-called solid geometry cedes to fractal geometry and to the fluidities of the solution was hyper-function: the new stair/doorway into the castle blurs functions screen space. Data in a computer can generate a picture or numerical lists or binary lists; in a hybridization that compresses the functions into a surprise. they can even be translated into music. Pixels transcend disciplines. Forms depicted on Plottegg had theorized hybrid architecture in a series of studies in which screen are understood by the computer as bits, and so become detached from the he did perhaps the first morphing in architecture, in which he fused one image with content of the representation information. A house and a cow lose their “content” in a another to create a third. Although morphing became a popular and even common digi- computer that sees no problem conflating cow and house because it does not distinguish tal technique by the 1990s, Plottegg developed the idea through manual systems at first apples from oranges. A new hybrid form owes nothing to figurative identity. in 1981, and then digitally. Plottegg advised anyone to consider any plan or any object, The computer liberated the architect from conceiving and assembling a that is, any ready-made, as a candidate for a morphing operation. Whatever the input, the building by analogue, detaching the image from the referent. Data are not analog. data could be radically transformed through its interaction with other data. Plottegg was maintaining that the data on screen are neither an architec- At first he hybridized his ready-mades manually, taking, for example, radial tural drawing nor a model, but detached from the “reality” usually depicted in a repre­ - distances from a central point in a house and a cow to map an average distance in a sentation. The shift from analog to digital procedure dislocates 2000 years of Vitruvius. fused, or morphed, object. Whether using Cartesian or polar coordinates did not matter “If you use the computer as it wants to be used, computers don’t have taste, and they because the rule or algorithm could be arbitrary if it was systematically applied. What can’t make historical comparisons,” he said. Plottegg’s use of the computer amounted to mattered was that the unpredictability of the result, which was released from authorial a declaration of independence and of resistance to established theory and practice. control. For Plottegg the iteration with the maximum deviation was the new design. In 1988, Plottegg, in association with Christoph Zechner, conceived the He soon hybridized ready-mades on the computer screen because, he said, “the manual Binary House for a competition called The most beautiful house in the world. He deconstructed techniques were too boring and time-consuming, so I turned to the computer.” Hybrid­ two 3D data sets, a house and a kindergarten, by morphing and mixing them with i­zing via a digital algorithm was swift and elegant. The computer generated hybrids other data sets, so that bits and pieces exploded on screen into a constellation of parts resulting from the data input of analog drawings such as Corbusier’s Modulor and a without a site, plan or point of view: the parts no longer constituted a whole. Perspective Thonet chair, or the floor plan of an apartment and the map of Austria. was obsolete. Elements were no longer standard. They had no name or size. Morphing and mixing had opened the systems of each data set, dissolving the internal logic of the system so that the components were open to interpretation. Any two binary lines are devoid of content. The lines have no name or function. For Plottegg the computer had

016 017 obsolesced static models of architectural production, emancipating design from func- to mention the relevance of fundamentalist typologies and conventions, making the tion. The environment on screen was completely open to interpretation—or, as Plottegg process unexpected, disjunctive, and unpredictable. said, “autocatalytic and algorithmic, quick and dirty.” This interactivity produces what Plottegg calls “a cornucopia whose By the time of the Binary House, literary deconstructionists had already main feature is complexity.” Plottegg challenged the omniscience of the human eye in theorized that the relationship between words and meaning was loose if not indeter­ his work on Trautenfels Castle, and similarly, his use of the computer removes the minate, and Plottegg was postulating the same between images on screen and their “aesthetic eye” of a designer and allows a greater level of complexity in what becomes referents: his computer detached them, separating the signifier from the signified. The an on-screen system of probabilities. The designer still has the power of manipula- conventions of architectural drawing no longer obtained, establishing the syntax that tion by varying the probabilities, but in an open system, the element of chance still fixed parts in a relational meaning. Liberated from representation, the parts floated plays a dominant role in determining the form of the outcome. [ From The Double like free radicals, free to bond. Two closely spaced parallel lines may not indicate a wall, Arrow, Architecture of Becoming, architectural flier, 1992 ] Plottegg’s counterintuitive goal, for example. Grids and patterns, similarly, have no set meaning. The lines or planes he says, is “to get the computer to design the project for me.” signify nothing—they are simply strokes on a screen. “Because they are not signifiers, because they are not charged with meaning, they are easy to manipulate and manage From his early investigations, as in the Collapsed Bed, Plottegg’s modus operandi was in any combination. Lines are nameless, and therefore devoid of architectural function,” to open closed systems, whether systems of thought or building systems. He avoided he said. If some architects were taking the fundamentalist position that architecture design determinism with a variety of techniques that he invented or developed, is, and should be, based on established typologies, and that the parts of a building—its in­cluding morphing, estrangement, deviation, inversions, irony, swerve, optics, visual windows, doors, lintels—also play known roles in fixed hierarchies of parts, Plottegg deconstruction, virtuality, dislocation, algorithmic inversions. But the computer brought was instead taking it all apart, freeing the parts into orders emergent on screen. his investigations and speculations into open systems to a whole new level of potential. The shards, lines, triangles, wedges and other forms of his Binary House In one of many exhibition installations, Hyper-Hybrid Architecture Generator, reconfiguring themselves in a directionless, anti-gravitational environment suggested of 2008, at the Vienna University of Technology, he devised a new sort of camera obscura, endless configurations in endless variations of houses. The parts are released into an or camera illuminata, in which a viewer standing in front of a screen displaying a field indeterminate state without preconception and predetermination. Conventions of of constructive elements (similar to the floating field of unnamed parts of theBinary architec­tural drawing or even “language” no longer govern the screen. Many interpre- House) projected the viewer as an avatar into screen space, or into virtuality, where the tations of the data are possible, none correct or incorrect. “We are in the field of a new viewer via the avatar could experience the environment and act on, and within, its relation­ship of form and information,” in an interpretative environment without a elements, which formed an inchoate but navigable environment. single, fixed point of view. The screen delivers the pivoting cameras in the Trautenfels It was a brilliant realization of the moment in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Castle to the architect at his desk. when the protagonist stepped into the screen in front of him, into cyberspace. Plottegg In the dynamic environment of the computer, with on-screen zooming and however did it outside the realm of fiction in a real-life exhibition at the Biennal de shifting, “South and hell are no longer down below,” he says: the process eliminates Arte Contemporáneo de Sevilla that hypothesized the fungibility of real and virtual direction and boundaries. Converging lines, for example, no longer signal three-dimen- space. The installation summarized in a single show the efforts that Plottegg had been sional depth; they might be the edges of a flat plane. The accidental forms of theBinary making since the time of his bathroom installations, at eliding real and virtual spaces. House result from the shift in paradigm from analog design to interpretative interaction, The computer, however, upped the ante: it emphasized the notion of cybervirtuality, and from pictures to what Plottegg calls “blottings” that are suggestive rather than deter­ he had been making efforts at merging the spaces in a continuity, lifting virtual space ministic. The architect need only ascribe dimension to the drawing. Designating a line off screen into real space and projecting the viewer from real space into virtuality. It one or five meters long starts an interpretation of all the other lines and shapes. was possible to cultivate and occupy the blur. He had left the perspectival world of ana- When he commands the computer to sort elements out by dimension, logs far behind. material or even price, or presses commands like shift, cancel, stretch, deform—“hack- Hyper-Hybrid Architecture Generator was the culmination of a long series of ing around,” says Plottegg—he is using the computer as he had mirrors and illusionistic installations in electronic media, starting in 1969, when Plottegg submitted a compe- graphics to deform real spaces. He launches the screen and space into a liberating tition entry for Architecture and Freedom, in association with Hartmut Skerbisch, in the instability. Destabilizing the canvas breaks the architect’s usual control over design, not Graz Kunsthaus. Opening the definition of the environment to include transmissions

018 019 by electronic media, even from far away, as well as “things hugging the skin,” Plottegg Within the installation, black cables could not be seen in the darkened set up a multi-media environment that included two TV cameras and two TV picture environment, and while visitors navigated the environment of cables projected on undu- tubes, loudspeakers for broadcasts, a slide projector and fine-meshed screen, plus two lating walls, they bumped into the real cables they could not see, in a case-study, real-life glass panes, one reflective and the other transparent. There were physical things, like reversal of the definition of real and virtual. the mirror, and then transmissions from the outside; the installation mixed real space In another part of the installation, Plottegg erected a tensegrity structure elements with virtualities coming in. The text on the mirror spells James Joyce’s of metal cables and compression struts supporting within its elegant web two-sided cryptic, verbally Cubist phrase, “Put allspace in a notshell.” screens and cameras projecting images of the same environment in a mise-en-abîme of Plottegg had created a mediated environment, with images and sounds virtualities nested in realities nested in virtualities. The installation is based on real-time projected and televised from near and far that was no less physical for being elec- human perception of space and the discourses on the shift from Euclidean geometry tronic. Images unrelated and unhinged from the immediate environment were nested to the not-quite graspable and locatable virtuality of cyberspace. Orientation is indefi- within it, related to each other in a web of facts that constituted an informational nite, and shapes are irrelevant, the distinctions between outside and inside misleading. environ­ment. The mirror and glass panes were optically ambiguous enough to doubt Projected images weaken the corporeal presence of the surfaces on which they are space. Like Joyce, fitting the universal (“allspace”) in a nutshell, Plottegg encapsulated shown. Information floats, detached from the objects that carry it. Visitors walked into an image of a group of people sitting on a saturnine wheel under a cosmic cloud a built and projected parable of virtuality and physicality blurred. within a nutshell propped open by the VHS cords (the group shot was the LP cover of Blue Cheer, the loudest rock band at that time). He had miniaturized the cosmic and “I’m not a designer,” says Plottegg. “I just change rules.” For Plottegg, a basic problem perhaps universalized the miniature, conflating micro- and macro-environments within in architecture involves architects with a “signature,” the so-called “handwriting” of an electronic parable into which visitors could venture. Virtuality for Plottegg is real— the office, which the architect applies across commissions, whether for a church, office conceivable and buildable. The installation referred obliquely to black holes, Einstein, building or house. Plottegg’s one self-interdiction is what he calls self-similarity, the Henri Bergson’s theories of time and duration, and Marshall McLuhan’s riffs on media. repetition of a signature across projects and building types. In addition, he criticizes the The preciously conceived installation, now historic, was re-installed in a very elegant self-similar results of white-cube modern architecture, which follows certain rules, as update in the Kunsthaus in 2012. It had been a prescient marker in contemporary does Otto Wagner’s Neo-Classicism, or even Czech Cubism. He credits Deconstructivism archi­tectural history. with deconstructing the rules of architecture, citing his compatriot Wolf Prix of Coop Plottegg continued exploring the continuity between “reality” and virtu- Himmelb(l)au, for example, for making structural members thin in compression and ality in subsequent installations. “Virtuality is real,” he says. “It’s concrete. Sometimes thick in tension, rather than the reverse: Prix inverts the normal rule, generating reality is virtual.” For Plottegg the two are conflated. In 2002, Plottegg explored the a non-normative architecture. “Deconstructivists deconstruct the rules of architecture,” Hyper-Hybrid idea in a greatly expanded installation, The Web of Life, at a very appropriate Plottegg says. venue for the subject, the prestigious Karlsruhe Center for Art and Media, itself con- He notes that inversions are just one technique, and in any case, the tech- ceived as a latter-day Bauhaus to absorb the new virtual machine and its digital world niques differ between analog and digital processes. Rules can be changed more easily in in a post-mechanical, post-modernist culture. a computer, with immediate consequences. Plottegg conditioned the environment by doubting its physics, creating In his own practice, if one of Plottegg’s drawings looks like a Lissitzky, he spatially indeterminate, curving, invaginated spaces without apparent end. The discards the drawing because, however flattering and erudite, he believes the result amorphous form of the installation, completely covered with a fitted carpet, deprived can, and should, be new: “If you are still applying the old rules, you cannot be creative the visitor of visual orientation. and do something new,” he says. “You don’t even have to think about it: you just change The undulating walls in the darkened and disorienting environment served the algorithm, whether it’s analog or digital.” Changing the rule is independent of the as screens for the projection of digitally produced images, akin to the abstractions of input. At Trautenfels Castle, he changed the rule for a door from being a flat plane to a the Binary House, a floating environment of lines and planes and clouds in which visitors, stereometric form, and changed its axis of rotation from vertical to horizontal. Changing some of them filmed and projected on screen, wandered like avatars in their own the rules can trigger unexpected results and a self-catalytic process because they are reality. Scans of the inner space were beamed onto the outer skin with the fitted carpet. not controlled by the omniscience of an architect. Changing the algorithm in the The projections represented multiple manifestations of the web, some in 3D (to be seen computer, however, replaces an anthropocentric process with an external, automated with 3D glasses).

020 021 process that does not carry an individual signature, and it also unplugs architecture progres­sions, produced an overall fractal complexity. The wire-frame renderings of the from traditions and meanings carried over in memories embedded in traditions that submission panels show the project with x-ray transparency, unusual for the time; involve the hand and perspectival eye. “The hard drive obsolesces the linear, singular its multi-perspectival array of images graphically conveys the underlying spatial com- and visual logic of orthogonal projects,” he says. Plottegg notes that changing the rules plexity of the project. in the computer is more easily done than “in your brain or behavior.” In the computer RESOWI was historically precocious, an early and important work of the variations and sheer quantity are greater than in analog design. Deconstructivism avant la lettre that used a digital logic to arrive at anti-formalist con­ Like a theoreticial physicist, Plottegg has conducted experiments through- clusions similar to those proposed by Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman and Plottegg’s out his career with his installations and exhibitions. Sometimes he just produced Austrian compatriots Coop Himmelb(l)au, but by different logics. Plottegg arrived at the specula­tions, such as proposing in a sketch that pencil lead buried in an eraser would position early. produce a scribble when used to erase: the simple mechanical substitution replaced For an architect who eschewed the very idea of the architect’s omniscient linear thinking with non-linear accidentalism. control over a project, the computer offered the perfect aleatory escape from the notion But in the architecture office in Graz, which he has maintained over the of design as it descended from the Renaissance. It challenged signature; it even chal- decades, he has applied his own discoveries like an applied physicist to the design of real lenged the planimetric prejudice of paper. Concerning the Seiersberg Housing Development buildings. The application of his theories is perhaps more obvious when he renovates project of 1987, a built social housing project done in collaboration with Christoph a ready-made—a “found” building—with an installation that transforms its nature, such Zechner and Fritz Mascher, Plottegg said, “My goal was to get the computer to design the as the installations he designed for Trautenfels Castle. But Plottegg has also applied project for me.” He notes that Mozart made compositions with dice, and therefore theory in many ground-up projects, including the usually no-nonsense commissions for randomness. Plottegg developed the design on the screen interactively, using commands designing public housing, with their strict rules and strict budgets. such as “insert,” “shift,” “stretch,” “setvar,” “double,” “dynamo,” “donut,” and “cancel” For a competition for an urn cemetery in Graz in 1985, and for another to morph multi-colored and structural pixel arrangements into the by-now familiar in Linz in 1999, Plottegg used the random function of the computer to distribute pixels, randomized field of abstract elements that he first generated for the Binary House: or graves, on the site, simulating the free selection of locations according to participa- Plottegg “reads” the random lines and what he calls “blottings” to interpolate the site tory processes. Instead of predetermining the layout of the cemetery with axes or a grid, plan, floor plan, section and elevation from a drawing that conflates all spatial dimen- and building the whole infrastructure before the placement of the urns, Plottegg rea- sions on screen (a technique distantly related to his Collapsed Bed when everything came soned that it was actually more practical to open the plot, and the system, to free choice, together in the fall). The design for the housing is latent in the computer-generated so that the first urn is placed here, the second over there, in a simulation of randomness drawing, and he teases and “lifts” the plan out of the graphic field by assigning scale and that would eventually accommodate 5,000 urns. With each urn represented by a pixel, definitions to the parts, by “looking for what I need.” He finds the necessary elements the pixels form a web that generates walkways and infrastructure. As the numbers in a drawing that acts as a chest of parts. increase, the random locations coalesce into a field of dots that self-organize into a self- If the built result looks crisp and clean, like an artifact of industrial determining network in an emergent landscape. In a process that resembles the build-up Modernism, it is because one of the parameters factored into the computer and the of lines in a drip painting by Jackson Pollock, the cemetery gradually fills in, obeying a design process is the list of rules required for standardized housing by the client, subliminal order that is non-linear and non-Euclidean, but rational per the ratiocination a state bureaucracy. He achieves a near zero degree of design, if “design” is intended of a digital process based in the pixilation of the screen and field. Plottegg’s system is to mean “signature.” But the repetitive and cellular nature of the units forming ordered within its apparent disorder. housing blocks is not a conceptual problem for Plottegg, since in this and subsequent Also in 1985, for a competition for the RESOWI Center at the University housing projects he treats the blocks as a readymade that he recontextualizes with of Graz, Plottegg and his collaborator Martin Zechner studied the space allocations of interventions so subtle that they escape the vigilant eye of the bureaucracy. The façade the institute by scripting the computer and changing the parameters, producing a of balconies carries metal struts, apparently structural but without clear function, random distribution of spaces in the 500-room building, resulting in lines that look like some configured in a truss that echoes a classical cornice line. A stairway to a second tracings of dice thrown in a game. Scripting at this time was a little-known technique floor is detached from the building, free-standing, leading to nowhere. rarely applied in architecture, and Plottegg’s tactics of random proportions, random distribution and random spatial rotations, generating geometric and functional

022 023 In the Eybesfeld Castle Housing Project of 2003, he positioned storage cabinets in the “one-bedroom” units to maximize openness. Doors attached to the cabinets, left unswung, keep the units open, like lofts, but swung together, the doors divide the loft- like spaces into a conventional layout of living room and bedroom. The doors create a participatory environment that allows the occupant to determine the interior configura- tion. Plottegg believes that a plan should be left “half-done,” for the client to finish. Real spaces, like his screen, are participatory, inviting interpretation. The play of swinging doors recalled Duchamp’s famous door that pivots on its hinges to close either the kitchen or the adjacent bathroom: one door, two rooms. At Eybesfeld, the scaffolding hanging from the façades’ balconies suspends louvers that give the units environmental controls that help shade and protect the apartments. In one apartment block within the project, Plottegg expands the metal scaffolding into a spatial trellis that accommodates not only balconies but also plantings: the entire architectural façade disappears behind a forest of wisteria. Inside the units he dynamizes the living spaces with angled walls that separate the front of the apart- ments from the back.

In his decades of asymmetrical practice, Plottegg has sustained a high level of intel­ lec­tual enquiry, speculating in territory well beyond polite discourse and established conven­tion. His serial disruptions constituted a critique that was charismatic and incisive—and difficult to ignore. The dislocating speculations of his practice, every project a thesis, either anticipated or confirmed the challenges brought by his spiritual colleagues, the Deconstructivists, to reposition a field which they have redefined together, permanently shifting architecture’s bases of practice. Plottegg did not simply tease the center from the margins in a trivial pur- suit of frisson, but brought serious intellectual challenges that could hardly be dismissed. He grafted his conceptual challenges in the analog world to his work in digital design, fusing two critiques into a powerful driver of change on the Austrian and European fronts. He lifted cyberspace out of the computer into “real” space, in a reciprocal two- way transreality between the physical and virtual. He created environmental installa- tions that were wildernesses of transparency, reflection and physical fact, the real and virtual positing together a new type of very liquid space and experience. He has been disruptive not for the sake of disruption, but for the sake of progressive change, forging a vector of his own into and through architecture’s new potentials.

024 025 Works

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Bit String One Pixel Frozen image of a bit string generated by a script, 1994 Drawing, 210 × 297 mm, 1994

“… we are in an environment of zeros and ones.” Hand drawing, black felt pen on paper (original 1985, red felt pen)

028 029 trigon 69 201231 trigon 69 201231

Our configuration is aimed at establishing connections to the spatial configuration web of ascertainable facts. Constituted by establishing relations based on: For us, environment is the instantaneous access point, 2 tv cameras as a remote site the present field of experience. Occurrences brought closer by the senses 2 tv picture tubes and all visions. Things hugging the skin, and trans­­missions by electronic loudspeakers with orf broadcasts media from far away. Facets of total space individually picked up and two glass panes put together. letters The user should be able to realize that he can experience the a slide projection environment in a more comprehensive manner thanks to the artificial consumption of electric energy environment of the configuration. Two glass panes—one reflecting, the other transparent—are Original text of competition project, Trigon ’69 positioned on a walk-on surface. orf broadcasts are audible at 40 phons. Two tv tubes show part of the city. Loudspeakers and tv tubes are removed from the receiver and transformer units. A slide projection is visible on both sides of a fine-meshed grid. Letters on the mirror spell out the sentence: Putting Allspace in a Notshell. James Joyce All objects and the visitor himself can show up in the mirror. There is neither inside nor outside. The configuration is accessible from all sides. It can be switched on and off.

This spatial configuration corresponds to a plan of environmental relations and impacts that cannot be directly perceived.

Original text of competition project, Trigon ’69

Putting Allspace in a Notshell Competition entry, 1969 In collaboration with Hartmut Skerbisch †

Spatial configuration, Architecture & Freedom, Trigon ’69, Graz

030 031 Putting Allspace in a Notshell Plan, competition entry, 1969 In collaboration with Hartmut Skerbisch †

Spatial configuration, Architecture & Freedom, Trigon ’69, Graz

032 033 trigon 69 201231

From a fixed standpoint, there is a clear sequence of distances between the viewer and the various occurences — which manifests itself in perspectival orders of magnitude. Elements such as those used in our configuration eliminate the pers­pectival geometric space. They are elements of daily use. It is not the biggest or the most obvious, but the most intense that becomes the object of our experience. The phenomenon of nesting environments which occurs here is read from reality and is itself reality. Therefore, the effect of the configuration becomes evident not before, but by using. Images, sounds, and signs are unhinged from the general environment and reproduced in a configuration. They converge for the user; transformed in their appearance, but within easily recognizable relations: we find ourselves in a web of facts whose information constitutes the demonstration­ space. Mass (matter) is merely used for devices that make those facts perceivable for us.

Original text of competition project, Trigon ’69

Putting Allspace in a Notshell Installation, 2012 In collaboration with Hartmut Skerbisch †

Graz, Universalmuseum Joanneum, Kunsthaus

034 035 trigon 69 20231

We have important reasons to avoid theoretic treatises. On 26 January 1839, an essay by Arthur Schopenhauer on The Freedom of the Will was awarded a prize by the Royal Norwegian Society of Science and Arts in Trondheim. This has had no noticeable effects over the past one-hundred and seventy years, though. All manifestoes on architecture fail because they are linguistic proliferations rather than architecture. As a consequence, we see arguments such as “flexibility in architecture corresponds to the desire for freedom” or “organic building types for organic life processes.” Such simplifications have nothing to do with configurations of space. Theory appears as a discipline that uses hardly effective media regarding the environment. To convert theory into practice means to transform information from one medium into another. The essential issue is how much information is distorted by transformation and how much gets completely lost. Since information travels at the speed of total causality, the difference between theory and practice has ceased to be valid. We cannot share the view that prognostic research might be an appropriate support for future planning. Because of the lack of distance between observer and environment, every observation is an interference that changes the situation being dealt with (opinion polls, for example, do not record opinions that are still valid after the poll, but form environments). From the observation that scientific findings have little impact on the built environment, it can be concluded that essential changes do not happen in the field of architecture. The implementation of results is shifted to technologies which are not yet available; results are expected in the wrong fields. This makes it difficult to recognize ongoing processes and resolve current questions with the available facilities: we are part of a comprehensive environment which is not bound by gravity, in which building activities are just outgrowth. Our competition contribution is a configuration that corre­ sponds to the situation in which we are living.

Original text of competition project, Trigon ’69

Putting Allspace in a Notshell Installation, 2012 In collaboration with Hartmut Skerbisch †

Graz, Universalmuseum Joanneum, Kunsthaus

036 037 Digital Architecture Generator Exhibition, 1991 In collaboration with Hans Kupelwieser

The Synthetic Dimension, De Zonnehof, Amersfoort Raw data: 2 ½ D data of the “Sun Bosom Hammer” logo of the Lord Jim lodge; Original stamp for members of the Lord Jim Lodge generated lines stemming from a data crash dump when transferring data from DOS to Mac

038 039 3D objects

Experimental setup for proving our thesis regarding digital creativity: sequences of impulses (spike trains) in biological organisms = binary sequences of signs (bit strings) = data that can be interpreted as coordinates, vectors, solids. A pc generates bit strings, from which a second pc continuously generates new 3D objects/configurations through Lisp.

Spike trains

Bit strings

Neuronal Architecture Generator Installation, 1999—2004 In collaboration with Wolfgang Maass

Künstlerhaus Wien 1999 (interactive version), update Graz, Neue Galerie 2001, update Karlsruhe, Center for Art and Media 2002

040 041 Neuronal Architecture Generator Installation, 1999—2004 In collaboration with Andreas Gruber (programming)

Screenshots, Karlsruhe, Center for Art and Media 2002 Screenshots, Graz, Neue Galerie 2001

042 043 Hyper-Hybrid Architecture Generator Installation, 2008

Platform in Second Life, Vienna, University of Technology Generated architecture: building components fall randomly as debris on the Second Life Island, continuously generating new spatial configurations.

044 045 Hyper-Hybrid Architecture Generator Exhibition, 2008

youniverse, BIACS 3, Bienal de Arte Contemporáneo de Sevilla The visitor enters the installation (= the Second Life Island) and simultaneously becomes manifest in five physical states: man, shadow, avatar, actor’s video, actor’s live data.

046 047 Variables: hatch type = ANSI 31, hatch scale = 10, hatch angle = 45, line type = dashed, line type scale = 100; the configuration of the angles leads to geometrical breaks and differentiations.

The line-variable values chosen with respect to the plot allow for nominal building depths of 8 m.

Spielberg Housing Development Computer-generated design, 1991

Housing development competition for approx. 900 housing units (multi-story, attached, semidetached, and single-family houses). The hatch algorithm is used to design the structural configuration of the housing development.

048 049 Spielberg Housing Development Generated design, 1991

Functional layout, general site plan

050 051 Line Seeking Concrete Installation, 1989

Periferie, exhibition, Graz, Haus der Architektur Interactive game on Amiga 2000 generates lines: response errors lead to crashes with fireballs, followed by generated architectural designs displayed on several screens. The architectural drawings are printed out instantly and fall to the ground, freshly dated and signed, to be taken for free.

052 053 Line Seeking Concrete Prints (stylus printer), 1989

Periferie, exhibition, Graz, Haus der Architektur

054 055 The Binary House Generated architecture, 1988 In collaboration with Christoph Zechner

Originally conceived for the competition la casa più bella del mondo Morphing on Amiga 2000, exhibition and catalogue, Architekturgalerie München Two 3D datasets were deconstructed through morphing and mixed with other datasets. Different iterations in different perspectives constitute the layout of the Binary House.

056 057 axioms of the binary house

The Binary House only exists in the cpu. Binary lines are devoid of content. Lines are nameless, and therefore without function. The plans for the Binary House are ambiguous. The inventory of forms is supplied by the cpu. The Binary House is fully present in the cpu. The presentation to the eye is instantaneously present. Retrieved images are equivalent. The Binary House itself has no place in an environment lacking a viewpoint. The Binary House itself has no dimensions. The cpu compresses time to simultaneity. The Binary House is simultaneous and timeless, it is not hereditary. The Binary House is non-material, dematerialized architecture. The Binary House can be built.

axioms of interaction

Interaction manipulates the Binary House. Interaction knows no preconceived images. The cpu works unbiassedly and wants to be used this way. The cpu demands that the designer detaches himself from content-based attitudes. The cpu does not depend on architecture-specific programs. The cpu produces without end and with consistent quality. Outputs are a variety of incidents. No output is an improvement of another. Abstraction ought to be retained as long as possible. Dashes are decoded by interaction. In an inventive way, novelties and misunderstandings are maintained. Naming determines the function. Additional formulations can be found in recycling. Interactive architectural production turns into a cornucopia. The Binary House is declared a realizable structure.

The Binary House Blueprint including floor plans, sections, elevations, perspectives

058 059 The architecture of the zkm installation is a curvilinear black cavity. The usually planar and orthogonal surfaces of walls, floor, and ceiling are substituted by an amorphous environment in which the siteless audio- visual virtuality of the Web of Life’s projected formations are pushed to the fore of the visitors’ experience. The exterior presents itself as a web of wires and extreme perspectives of net-like geometries.

Web of Life Installation, 2002 In collaboration with Jeffrey Shaw

ZKM, Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe Completely covered with a fitted carpet, the amorphous form of the installation deprives the visitor of visual orientation: it is dark and uneven; wall, floor, steps to sit on, and bumps, exterior and interior merge. The interior of the space is recorded by a thermal imaging camera and beamed onto the outer surface; projection inside: white high brilliant; outside: black mat (fitted carpet).

060 061 The architectural concept of the zkm installation is based on the human perception of space and on the discourses concerning the shift from Euclidean geometry to the not locatable virtuality of cyberspace. As the modality of the installation is wysiwyg, the significance of its shapes per se is no longer relevant. The three-dimensional projected scenery inside obtains its elusive counterpart in the form of what could be described as a “fuzzy black potato.” Orientation (in a spatial and metaphoric sense) is indefinite, and the perception of inside/outside is rendered misleading. The remaining corporality of the structural surfaces is further erased by projected overlays, which—detached from the object as information carrier—become pure information. With the aged architectural traditions of “expressive presence” now giving way to the practices of “media architecture,” the zkm installation posits the newer notion of “architecture as a computational editor that captures floating information.”

Web of Life Exhibition Opening, 2002

ZKM, Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe Multiple manifestations of the web: 3D in space (to be seen with 3D glasses) as projected lines, as cables under tension (black cables that cannot be seen in front of the black carpet — people bump into the cables). Reversal of the definition of virtual as “visible, but physically not present” to “real, physically present but not visible.” (For reasons of security the cables were changed to white, which is why they are visible in the picture.)

062 063 Web of Life Installation, 2002

Remote control station for communication between different sites (Brisbane, Bratislava, Rotterdam, Zagreb, Stuttgart, a. o.) Tensegrity construction, suspended in the space like a web. Some compression struts have been replaced by the required pc racks working as nodes, by the flat two-sided glass projection screen, and by transparent loudspeakers.

064 065 Regarding the number of legs, a chair with four legs would have to be phylogenetically classified between slug and centipede. In terms of evolution, the two-legged “Rocker” corresponds to man or rather kangaroo. More­over, the “Rocker” is a twofold contribution to the architectural discourse of “the column-free corner.”

Rocker Prototype Design/Object, 1967 Rocker Edition Student work for furniture construction course at Graz, University of Technology Edition Artelier, 2009 The torn-out legs of the chair are structurally replaced by the user’s legs, which results in a dynamic seating position. Graz, Artelier Contemporary

066 067 Presentation of the winning project

This is a chair!

Vorläufer … precurseur … forerunner Design/Object, 2010

Competition “Styria’s Next Chair Designer” Further development of the “Rocker,” prototype for industrial manufacture; standard seating shells covered with an overlength fitted carpet. For different positions.

068 069 The chair as a spatial element

Vorläufer … precurseur … forerunner Rendering, 2010

Concept for an exhibition installation on Cologne Orgatec Boulevard

070 071 Biedermeier tabernacle chest

Typical Austrian Futon Construction Design/Object, 1997

Furniture prototype, exhibition of one-off items of artists’ furniture at Graz, Neue Galerie and Vienna, MAK The object offers a large variety of possible physical positions (exceeding those of a flat futon by far). The drawers need not be emptied.

072 073 on the process of collapsing

Collapsing is not a reflective process, but a direct manipulation of Without trying to exert control in whatever which way, the process objects. Definition is not a priori effected by language (title, associations and the still cryptic (detailed) shape of the output are accepted. of words, desires, etc.), is not tied to semantic forms derived from The crash (at the moment of the collapse) shall be the symbol of graphic representations, is not determined by methods which renounce authority and inexorability of a physical process, the simultaneity nameless sophistication through premature expression. of acting force and result.

Collapsed Bed Object/Installation/Mattress sculpture, 1972

Student work for furniture construction course at Graz, University of Technology By collapsing, the originally indifferent bed surface acquires different intensities. This corresponds not so much to the general idea of construction, order (or bed), but to sensation rather. The simplicity of the experiments makes any further allusive narrative unnecessary.

074 075 Tube turned in, tieback. During inflation, the outer skin is stretched, The (turned-in) inner part acts as a tieback of minimum length. Its shortening the inner compressed. Each body imported into the inner skin is during the bending process is turned out. Thus, the balance of forces is tightly enclosed. established. Any spatial curvature is possible.

links and sleeves

Inflatable Structures Installation, 1968

Student work for furniture course at Graz, University of Technology Pneumatic: the turned-in tube can be deformed and provides form stability (if formed); the drawn-back inner part of the tube works as a tieback that additionally stabilizes itself along the inner curve through friction.

076 077 Inflatable Structures Installation, 1968

Student work for furniture course at Graz, University of Technology

078 079 Plottegg, Graz 1969 Kogler, Krems 1996

Pneumatic Installation, 1997 In collaboration with Peter Kogler

Graz, Galerie & Edition Artelier Plottegg offers Kogler three-dimensionality: the tube patterns are detached from the wall surface and formed freely in the center of the space. ø 60 cm polyethylene tube, turned in; printing pattern by Kogler, pattern repeat: 36 cm.

080 081 video still.prn Prints, 1997

Computer printouts … transferred from Photoshop … transferred from video

082 083 Pneumatic Pneumatic Installation, 1998 Installation, 2000 In collaboration with Peter Kogler In collaboration with Peter Kogler

Nice, Galerie Soardi Bregenz, Kunsthaus ø 60 cm polyethylene tube turned in, printing pattern by Kogler, pattern repeat: 30 cm ø 60 cm polyethylene tube turned in, printing pattern by Kogler, pattern repeat: 30 cm

084 085 Pneumatic Installation, 1999 In collaboration with Peter Kogler

Salzburg, Rupertinum ø 100 cm polyethylene tube turned in, printing pattern by Kogler: hose, silver-grey

086 087 Art Lounge Art Lounge Interior Conversion, 2002 Redesign, 2007

Café Korb, Vienna, Brandstätte Café Korb, Vienna, Brandstätte With contributions by Günter Brus, Peter Kogler, Manfred Plottegg, and Peter Weibel Design for a face-lifting of the art lounge (not realized)

088 089 Ladies’ and Men’s at Café Korb Interior Conversion, 2004

Lavatory at Café Korb, Vienna, Brandstätte Freely formed aluminum, powder-coated; swing doors with typographic pictograms (with horizontal lower part for foot operation)

090 091 Ladies’ and Mens’ at Café Korb Interior Conversion, 2004

092 093 Fringe Bathroom Interior Conversion, 1984

Graz, Brunngasse Carwash brushes and artificial turf

094 095 Fringe Bathroom Interior Conversion, 1984

Graz, Brunngasse

096 097 Fringe Helmet (Mohawk) Design/Object, 1989

Helmet prototype for a Roman centurion, Emperor Francis Joseph, or the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club (HAMC)

Fringe Car Design/Object, 1989

Fringes as a spoiler extension for stall prevention of air flow at less than 123.5 kph

098 099 Tube Lamp (Low Cost Lamp 1) Design/Object, 1991

Polyethylene hose inflated with air heated by a halogen spotlight Open source design, may be reproduced for free

100 101 Stone Lamp “Model Rudi Dutschke” (Low Cost Lamp 2) Design/Object, 1992

Lighting at Trautenfels Castle … I go one step further than Wittgenstein … I add a stone … Open source design, may be reproduced for free

102 103 Triangular Lamp (Low Cost Lamp 3) Design/Object, 1995

½ rectangle (approx. 95 × 55 cm), double-layer safety glass held by two steel bolts, dimmed halogen Open source design, may be reproduced for free

104 105 Bathrooms with Stripes Interior Conversion, 1982—1983

1982 Graz, Schillerstrasse 1982 Wien, Am Hof 1983 Graz, Liebiggasse

106 107 Bathroom “for K. Schwitters” Interior Conversion, 1983

Graz, Liebiggasse

108 109 Bathroom with Laundry Interior Conversion, 1996

Graz, Brandhofgasse The suspended grid goes up and down (down-position: hang up laundry, up-position: dry laundry).

110 111 Bathroom “for J. Baudrillard” Interior Conversion, 1996

Jöss, Eybesfeld Castle The window in the mirror is in place of the other (real) one. The washbasin in the mirror is in the same place as the other (real) one. The person in the mirror is standing in the place of the other person: virtual = real.

112 113 Gonflable, 1993, by Hans Kupelwieser

Bathroom for H. Kupelwieser Interior Conversion, 1997 In collaboration with Hans Kupelwieser

Graz, Lichtenfelsgasse Aluminum pillow blown up, inflated aluminum that hugs the skin … From the Sucking and Blowing series

114 115 Bathroom for M. M. O. Plottegg Interior Conversion, 2007

Graz, Lichtenfelsgasse One-sided pillow sucked against the wall, aluminum that hugs the skin … From the Sucking and Blowing series

116 117 118 119 first architectural competition of the lord jim lodge won by m. m. o. plottegg!

The first prize for the first time ever architectural competition of the Lord Jim Lodge was awarded to the architect m. m. o. Plottegg. But as nobody has the slightest idea what the submitted work, Cathedral of Intelligence, is about, m. m. o. Plottegg was committed to making a proper drawing before the jubilee edition of Sun Bosom Hammer, the central organ of the Lord Jim Lodge, would be published.

Cathedral of Intelligence Computer drawing, 1991

First 2 ½ D (3D) drawing of the Lord Jim Lodge’s logo (original rubber stamp by M. Kippenberger, A. Oehlen, and W. Bauer) These data were used as an input for “the synthetic dimension” et seqq.

120 121 Cathedral of Intelligence “Proper drawing,” 2006

Sun Bosom Hammer Renderings stemming from a 1991 data animation (stills)

122 123 Cathedral of Intelligence Model, 2011

Sun Bosom Hammer 3D printout (1991 data)

124 125 Mr Faust Playing Roulette Model, 1986 In collaboration with Martin Zechner

Proposal for a stage design for a play by Wolfgang Bauer

126 127 Tower Staircase Revitalization, 1989

Trautenfels Castle Supporting reinforced concrete and suspended steel structure

128 129 Rail made of piano wire (tensed, tuned to a twelve-tone composition by Friedrich Waidacher)

130 131 132 133 Ladies’ and Men’s Revitalization, 1992

Trautenfels Castle Standard metal sheet-pile profiles as partition walls, seven different toilet paper rolls for more comfort

134 135 Cash Desk Revitalization, 1992 In collaboration with Andreas Gruber

Trautenfels Castle Steel and glass construction; “propeller” as geometric transfer of the straight line in the vault to the visitors’ ground plan line

136 137 Doors Revitalization, 1992

Trautenfels Castle Automatic sliding doors: Eternit lavatory door, wavy glass porch / exit door

138 139 Steps or Door Revitalization, 1992

Trautenfels Castle Prismatic cantilevered steps for new stairwell; the same pre-fab components were used for a safety door.

140 141 3D Door, Door Steps Steps Door Revitalization, 1992 In collaboration with Andreas Gruber

Trautenfels Castle Changed door algorithms: swivel axes are horizontal (instead of vertical), the doors are stereometric bodies (instead of flat door leaves), open doors are not functionless (stairs).

142 143 Random lines, blots, area fills; extrapolations, reductions, selections; interpretation of lines, blots, area fills through construction models. The model reads lines as building volumes or streets, as bananas and lemons, in short, as the “Seiersberg development plan.”

Thus houses appear in the field. The Seiersberg project was mainly generated interactively on the screen. Multi-colored and structural pixel arrangements conceive the project in response to commands such as “insert,” “shift,” “stretch,” “setvar,” “double,” “dynamo,” “donut,” “cancel,” etc. In this illustration (reproduction from the screen), points, lines, planes, and networks can be recognized. Seiersberg Housing Development The design exists simultaneously in various virtual pictures. Project development, 1987 The data printout in form of a picture is an indication of the spatial model. In collaboration with Christoph Zechner and Fritz Mascher The printout is, according to the respectively alleged scale, a flat draft and a spatial fragment at the same time. Computer-generated (Photoshop) design for 160 housing units In order to facilitate perception in terms of current visual habits and to ensure an excellent quality of living, each dwelling has its own entrance door.

144 145 Seiersberg Housing Development Construction, façade and ground plan development, 1987

Seiersberg, Photoshopping, scalings, interpretations Random lines and grids yield “templates for everything”: ground plan, view, site plan, functions; image recognition according to the rule “what do I need?”

146 147 Seiersberg Housing Development New construction, 1991

Seiersberg, Styria, first construction stage: 40 subsidized housing units Curtain wall façade, continuous balconies as extended living rooms

148 149 The increasingly random distribution simulates free selection of a location according to participatory models. This simulation offers the formal concept, the ground plan pattern for the entire complex. With the number increasing, the grave dots begin to form a network of 5,000 tomb slabs. In accordance with what the graphic representation/the computer suggests, the slabs are used as a network of paths. This saves cost for infrastructure (marble slabs provide good surfaces for walking; there is no need for gravel or asphalt surfaces), and visitors are closer to the deceased (directly above them).

Settings: 1 pixel = 1 tomb slab, 1 m × 1 m Gradually, the pixels = graves are randomly distributed on the plot.

Urn Cemetery Graz Competition, 1985 In collaboration with Christoph Zechner and Andreas Gruber

Computer-generated design (Photoshop with script) for 5,000 urn graves No hot ash!

150 151 Random distribution of three-dimensionally twisted, differently scaled toilets. It is this universally employed “fractal element” that determines the project. As it is to be assumed that only a few persons (nobody) want to leave their ashes in a toilet, the bowls are replaced by architectural elements (wall brackets or step elements), while the original toilet bowl distribution is preserved. Thanks to the fractal concept, the elements may be used in all sizes and functions (as wall or roof elements, as building or urn walls).

Urn Cemetery Linz Competition, 1999

Computer-generated design

152 153 Puha szimbólumok / Soft Symbols Competition, 2005 In collaboration with Hans Kupelwieser

Central memorial to the Hungarian Revolution, Budapest (on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956) Hammer and sickle, the Red Star, a kalashnikov, T-34/85 tanks, 1956 (struggle for freedom), and 1989 (system change) are the historical incunabula. Their shadows taken as basic forms were scaled, cut out of a rubber sheet, and deformed into 3D sculptures, which were put directly on the ground — without pedestals! The square is paved with white marble.

154 155 Kalashnikov (soft version) Object, 2009 In collaboration with Hans Kupelwieser

Installation for the art shop exhibition of the Johnny Weissmüller Society, Graz Rubber sculptures, edition

156 157 Under the premise that products may look different from what anticipated products look like, all initial shapes can be combined according to what­ever rules. Recorded data of different initial shapes can be hybridized among each other. Initial shapes may also be crossed to hybrids with other purely mathematical, invisible forms, with random sequences of numbers. So take a ready-made, any plan, or whatever. The initial form will always be irrelevant, because the product of interaction will never rely on it.

Use random forms instead of a triangle, a T square, or a stencil; let the pencil run along isolines, mountain ridges, or the back of a cow.

Hybrid Architecture Computer design, 1981

Morphing program (developed in-house) Adding Cartesian or polar coordinates. The iteration with the maximum deviation is the new design.

158 159 Hybrid architecture Computer design, 1981

Morphing program (In-house programming) Modulor & Thonet chair / Scheiße & Genuß (shit & pleasure) / “Austrian House”

160 161 Travelling Tantra Altar Object, syncretic home altar, 1977 Anamorphotic images and painting: Wolf Gössler

Four picture puzzles, clip-clap mechanism, reversible suspension; broken up by stepped edge line

162 163 Finally, western culture has also bred the sapless category of “living.” Nothing seems more important now than to detach oneself intentionally from all logic and moral, from all internalized concerns. A large cloth is spread over everything there is. It is glass-fiber reinforced and planted. This inevitably brings about a comprehensively revised ranking of all the elements and processes within one’s own four walls. Now the flat is ready for occupancy again. This design is made for no one in particular, not even for me. It is not foreseeable in what sense this situation will present itself as a dwelling. It is clear that it is the result of purely architectural manipulations of a flat.

Planting starts with the uncontrolled scattering of peatdust and humus. Luxuriant vegetation spreads wildly throughout the rooms. Animals are taken into the flat, like a billy goat, for example; the proportions should be striking and effective. The fresh water riser is tapped. A continuous stream of water Metamorphosis of a Town Flat gushes forth, taking its course according to the given circumstances. Installation/Photomontage/Drawing, 1972 (Years of carelessness springing from indifference will eventually Student work at Graz, University of Technology yield the same results.)

164 165 Media Tower Revitalization, 1999

Graz, Herrgottwiesgasse Conversion of the water tower in the former slaughterhouse into an office, event and art gallery building for Galerie & Edition Artelier, external circulation

166 167 Galerie & Edition Artelier New construction, 2006

Graz, Herrgottwiesgasse Addition to Media Tower, reinforced concrete hall, three stories, external circulation, aluminum façade, façade printing: Peter Kogler

168 169 Leoben Housing Development New construction, 1992

Leoben, Sackgasse, eight subsidized housing units Architecture following building regulations, open central circulation

170 171 Loft Conversion New construction, 1987 In collaboration with Christoph Zechner

Graz, Grazbachgasse Typology competition for conversion of lofts in urban apartment buildings, ten subsidized housing units realized for selected users. Catwalk on ridge level with adjacent terraces is independent of direction and position of the street.

172 173 Extruded outlines forming the main body of the building Read-out contours as outer walls

RESOWI Centre, University of Graz Competition, 1985 In collaboration with Martin Zechner

Computer-generated design Space allocation program based on computer script, studies with changed parameters

Random distribution of cubed spaces, four limit pictures: orthogonal, rotated, broken-up rectangles, overlapping forms 174 175 176 177 RESOWI Centre, University of Graz Competition, 1985 In collaboration with Martin Zechner

3D model, axonometric projection (extruded contours), presentation model (paper strips as extruded contours) Diagram with site plan and 16 wireframe perspectives: collage, airbrush-rendering and films, 250 × 160 cm

178 179 How to use it: shake vigorously, put down abruptly (in an upright or horizontal position). How the elements fall yields the architectural design; several repetitions are recommended.

Analog Architecture Generator Object, 1987

Shaking model: Plexiglas prism 14 × 21 × 14 cm, including 4 spatial screenings (thermo- mechanically deformed overhead transparencies), one polyline (thread), signature, and date. Exhibited in Jenseits von Kunst (Beyond Art) in Graz, Budapest, and Antwerp.

180 181 Firefighters Museum Revitalization, conversion, 1995

Groß Sankt Florian 3D door with integrated aerial ladder (changed door algorithms)

182 183 Strikingly, the sanitary facilities will be visible for all passers-by right in the middle of the Domplatz. The booth will be lifted for users hydraulically, the “showcase” becoming a skylight. After use, the booth disappears in the ground again. Air exchange according to the bellows principle, toilet paper from an ink jet printer (ink jet pisser) interactively printing individual texts on the paper.

Public Toilet Project, 1994

Eisenstadt, Domplatz

184 185 Bathhouse New construction, 1993

Graz, Burgfriedweg No view from inside to outside, whereas everything inside can be seen from outside.

186 187 Place a User’s Manual Exhibition design for Jeffrey Shaw, 1995

Graz, Künstlerhaus Non-contact lightlocks

188 189 Identität : Differenz Exhibition design, 1992 Curator: Peter Weibel

Graz, Burgring, Tummelplatz, Herrengasse, Hauptplatz, Sporgasse Exterior design for public space using Plotteggs; route guidance from Künstlerhaus to Stadtmuseum

190 191 Original steel construction of the Künstlerhaus, 1950

Identity : Difference Exhibition design, 1992 Curator: Peter Weibel

Graz, Künstlerhaus Standard metal sheet pile profiles (as used in underground engineering) as oversized image carriers

192 193 Inclusion : Exclusion Exhibition design, 1996 Curator: Peter Weibel

Graz, Reininghaus Billboards in the street and in the exhibition hall

194 195 “Like sailors we are who have to rebuild their vessel at sea, without ever being able to disassemble it in the docks and rebuild it from the best parts available.”

Otto Neurath, 1932

Beyond Art Exhibition design, 1998 Curator: Peter Weibel

Antwerp, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Suspended exhibition, wobbling base

196 197 Phantom of Desire Exhibition design, 2003 Graz, Neue Galerie Curator: Peter Weibel Aluminum pendulum supports with wavy 3D mirror sheet metal as image carriers and floor covering

Orcus Vienna, Literaturhaus Exhibition design for Gerhard Roth, 2004 Wavy sheet metal, powder-coated

198 199 Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art Exhibition design, 2002 In collaboration with Peter Weibel

Karlsruhe, Center for Art and Media Sketches by the curators Peter Weibel, Bruno Latour, Peter Galison, Dario Gamboni, Joseph Leo Koerner, Adam Lowe, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist Geometrization and translation into building elements

200 201 Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art Exhibition design, 2002 In collaboration with Peter Weibel

Karlsruhe, Center for Art and Media Tilted prisms (trapezoidal sheet metal and coated panels)

202 203 Archdiploma 2007 Urban E Exhibition design, 2007 Installation, 1999 In collaboration with Harald Trapp

Design studio exhibition at Vienna, University of Technology Vienna, project space Karlsplatz Students’ works developed in the context of Plottegg’s visiting professorship Exhibition of the Faculty for Architecture at Vienna’s University of Technology

204 205 Styrian Yoga Film documentary, invitation card, 1982

Movie presentation at Graz, Forum Stadtpark on the occasion of the bicentennial of Archduke John of Austria’s birthday Two flipper book tricks; miniature settings: a teaspoon as a mirror between two fingers, a matchbox and a match as actors

206 207 Trautenfels as seen by the components Film documentary, installation, 1982

Stage directions: Fix a camera on all movable components. Shoot! Move all the components (open and close the door, for example). The film shows what the components see.

208 209 Every sixty seconds, two electronically controlled, powerful pumps blow water from the rear plate toward the front, startling passers-by.

Nordsee I Installation, 1979 In collaboration with Georg Gröller

Graz, Steirischer Herbst, Shop Windows by Artists / L’art vitrinale A shop window as an aquarium with crabs and a TV picture tube

210 211 Eybesfeld Castle Housing Project New construction, 2003

Jöss, Styria Open ground plans with flexible cabinets/boxes as room dividers

212 213 Eybesfeld Castle Housing Project, Green House New construction, 2004

Jöss, Styria Office and housing, sixteen units; three-meter-wide zones in front; Borobudur type, planted with bamboo or wisteria

214 215 216 217 The house in the lawn is a concept against compartmentalized developments and the loss of landscape they entail. It can be implemented as a single object, in a group, or as a densified low-rise development. The house in the lawn is modular and expandable in both directions, down and up, two or more stories. The geometry of the section corresponds to the geometry of an attic extension, the glass structure reaching deep into space, the living room terrace merging into the lawn. The house in the lawn is a massive construction. Structural design: the folding stiffens the roof, allowing wider unsupported spans and therefore free floor plan design. Building physics: the house in the lawn is a low-energy construction; the heat demand is 47 % less than that for a free- standing house.

Lawn House Project, 1994

Private, Pernitz/Neusiedl, Schallhof Remained unbuilt despite construction permit in landscape protection area.

218 219 The sectional view resembles that of a loft conversion; glass volumes project from the lawn instead of dormer windows from the roof surface.

Lawn House Competition, 1991

Housing development in Graz, Eggenberg, sixty flats

220 221 222 223 Housing Development “Society and Ecology” International pilot competition, 2007; realization, 2013

Gleisdorf Sixty-one housing units, bank, social service facilities

224 225 Austrian Cultural Institute Competition, 1992 In collaboration with Andreas Gruber

New York According to the NYC Building Regulation, flagpoles protruding beyond the building line (e. g. above hotel entrances) are allowed.

226 227 Exterior steel construction supplementing the room program

Literaturhaus Competition, 2000

Graz

228 229 Amazonas Wellness

Piranha-Pool

Vivarium Lobby Restaurant Sauna Wellness Competition, 1998, 2002

Neumarkt/Mariahof A water world as a tourist attraction

230 231 Exterior steel construction extending far into public space; opening of the Kunsthaus for public activities

Kunsthaus Competition, 2000

Graz

232 233 ZUGZOOMSCHÖNSCHNELL Installation, 1987 In collaboration with Christoph Zechner

Compartment of the future for the ÖBB travelling exhibition The Train of All Trains (shown all over Austria) Trains are long, slim and dirty; the train of the future is wide and well lit. Installation with movable projection screen (video ZUGZOOMSCHÖNSCHNELL beamed, here stills), uneven floor, train taking a bend in the mirror.

234 235 Mirror Toilet Prototype, 1979

Vienna Prototype for (Freudian) psychoanalyst Prof. M. H.

236 237 Toilet Shower Toilet Swing Prototype, 2012 Object, 1999 Graz Graz Prototype for a gush shower

238 239 Company Building Competition, 1986 In collaboration with Christoph Zechner and Andreas Gruber

Graz, Färberplatz The strict and conservative Graz Historic Centre Conservation Act also prescribes traditional window shapes and constructions. But if there are no windows, the law does not have to be respected: hence the free-form mesh skin to evade window regulations.

240 241 Fair Hall Competition, 1983

Graz

242 243 Wood in Housing Construction Competition, 1984 In collaboration with Christoph Zechner

Styria Airbrush-rendering

244 245 Semaine de Cuir Competition, 1984 In collaboration with Christoph Zechner

Paris

246 247 Housing Development St. Peter Competition, 1987 In collaboration with Christoph Zechner

Graz

248 249 Design Studio Exhibition 2010 Exhibition design, 2010 In collaboration with Harald Trapp

Department for Architecture, Design & Planning Methodology, Vienna, University of Technology

250 251 Architecture beyond Inclusion and Identity is Exclusion and Difference from Art Poster, 2002

Lecture about the making of three exhibitions at Graz, Neue Galerie Collage, Photoshop morphing of the three exhibition posters;the title is a sampling of the three exhibition titles.

252 253 “The Architect as a Seismograph” Spot the Difference Statement ad Hans Hollein, Architecture Biennale Venice, 1996 Poster, 2007 Kupelwieser verifies the seismograph theory. The picture of Plottegg himself on the right shows five changes compared with the one on the left. Plottegg asserts: architecture is not a seismograph.

254 255 Only those who possess the so-called Plottegg Code will be able to distinguish between the two systems based on a critique of perception or to experience them as a new and indeed thrilling aesthetic system.

The Plotteggs are coming Poster, 1995

Original poster: lecture by Friedrich Achleitner Redesigned poster by Peter Zimmermann with text by Friedrich Achleitner from Die Plotteggs kommen, published by Sonderzahl, Vienna

256 257 Generativní Architektury Siteless Poster, 2009 Poster, 1996

Solo show at the Austrian Cultural Forum in Prague Lecture Plottegg/Weibel, University of Innsbruck

258 259 The Binary House Solo show at Munic, Architekturgalerie Poster, 1990 Silk-screen prints with changing colors

260 261 Startup Models Poster, 1995

Exhibition at Architekturgalerie München Fresh Bits & Pixels Every Day Exhibition of student projects in the context of the CAAD Poster, 1987 professorship at Munich University of Technology, 1994/95 Exhibition at Forum Stadtpark, Graz

262 263 Browse Architecture Poster, 1995 The Solution of the Doric Corner Conflict in the Graz School of Architecture Announcement of a summer workshop at Graz, Poster, 1992 Haus der Architektur Workshop in collaboration with Marcos Novak and Lecture, Circolo Trentino Per L’Architettura Colin Fournier (cancelled) Contemporanea, Trento

264 265 Hybrid Architecture: Plottegg Ironing Against the Separation of Functions Poster, 2003

Announcement of course at Vienna, University of Architecture as Seen by the Components Technology Poster, 2012 Installation in front of the Institute for Architecture Lecture at Media Lab, Vienna, University of Technology and Design

266 267 Autocatalytic Architecture Poster, 1997 Plottegg’s Plots Poster, 2000 Double act Plottegg/Weibel; London, UCL, Bartlett School of Architecture Solo exhibition at Graz, Neue Galerie

268 269 Drawing Eraser Hybrid object/Tool, 1970

Invention: hybrid for drawing and erasing A lead is stuck into an eraser. When erasing, new lines are drawn synchronously and without thinking. These lines are automatically different from those preceding them.

270 271 Appendix

272 List of Works 276 Solo and Group Exhibitions 278 Books 278 Selected Contributions to Books 279 Selected Contributions to Magazines 279 Selected Lectures 281 Selected Reviews

282 Thanks to 282 Copyrights 283 Publisher’s Note

272 273 List of Works Eybesfeld Castle, Tower, Cavalier House, general refurbishment, 1996, Jöss, Styria Eybesfeld Project Development, High-tech Industrial Park, study, 1999, Jöss, Styria Fair Hall, competition, 1983, Graz • page xx xx 3D Door, Door Steps Steps Door, revitalization, 1992, Trautenfels Castle, Styria • page xx xx Fakeology, special lecture, April 1, 2001, Graz, University of Technology 3D Door, Eybesfeld Castle, project, 1997, Jöss, Styria Firefighters Museum, revitalization/conversion, 1995, Groß Sankt Florian, Styria • page xx xx 3D Door, Herberstein Palais, project, 1993, Graz, Neue Galerie Firefighters Museum, addition/revitalization/conversion, 2003, Groß Sankt Florian, Styria • page xx xx Administration Building for Mayr-Melnhof Packaging Austria GmbH, planning/new construction, 1991, Frohnleiten, Styria Firefighters Museum, Glass Roof, conversion, 1998, Groß Sankt Florian, Styria Amusement and Industrial Park, Factory Outlet, study, 1998, Jöss, Styria Flamhof Castle, general refurbishment, 1986, Flamberg, Styria Analog Architecture Generator (Analoger Architekturgenerator), object, 1987 • page xx xx Flat, conversion, 1996, Graz, Brandhofgasse Archdiploma 2007, exhibition design, 2007, Vienna, project space Karlsplatz • page xx xx Flat and Office, conversion, 1980, Milan, Via Sardegna Architecture as Seen by the Components (Architektur aus Sicht der Bauteile), poster, 2012 • page xx xx Fresh Bits & Pixels Every Day (Täglich frische Bits und Pixel), poster, 1987 • page xx xx Architecture beyond Inclusion and Identity is Exclusion and Difference from Art (Architektur jenseits von Inklusion und Identität ist Exklusion und Differenz von Kunst), poster, 2002• page xx xx Fringe Bathroom (Fransenbad), interior conversion, 1984, Graz, Brunngasse • page xx xx Art Lounge, interior conversion, 2002, Vienna, Brandstätte, Café Korb • page xx xx Fringe Car (Fransenauto), design/object, 1989 • page xx xx Art Lounge, redesign, 2007, Vienna, Brandstätte, Café Korb • page xx xx Fringe Helmet (Mohawk) (Fransenhelm), design/object, 1989 • page xx xx Austrian Cultural Institute, competition, 1992, New York • page xx xx Galerie & Edition Artelier, new construction, 2006, Graz, Hergottwiesgasse • page xx xx Austrian Pavilion, Expo 2008, competition, 2007, Sevilla • page xx xx Generativní Architektury, poster, 2009 • page xx xx Autocatalytic Architecture, poster, 1997 • page xx xx Grammar School Graz West, competition, 1986, Graz Bad zur Sonne, Indoor Pool, competition/revitalization, 1997, Graz Greater Graz Tax Office, planning/loft conversion, 1987, Graz Bathhouse, new construction, 1993, Graz, Burgfriedweg • page xx xx Grinzing City Apartment, renovation/conversion, 1992, Vienna Bathroom, interior conversion, 1982, Graz, Färbergasse Hartberg Castle, competition/conversion, 2010, Hartberg, Styria Bathroom “for J. Baudrillard,” interior conversion, 1996, Jöss, Styria, Eybesfeld Castle • page xx xx Housing Development, competition, 1998, Feldkirchen, Styria Bathroom “for K. Schwitters,” interior conversion, 1983, Graz, Liebiggasse • page xx xx Housing Development, competition, 1990, Graz, Banngrabenweg Bathroom for H. Kupelwieser, interior conversion, 1997, Graz, Lichtenfelsgasse • page xx xx Housing Development, new construction, 1992, Leoben, Sackgasse, Styria • page xx xx Bathroom for M. M. O. Plottegg, interior conversion, 2007, Graz, Lichtenfelsgasse • page xx xx Housing Development “Society and Ecology,” international pilot competition, 2007, Gleisdorf, Styria • page xx xx Bathroom with Laundry, interior conversion, 1996, Graz, Brandhofgasse • page xx xx Housing Development Irgang, new construction, 2003, Jöss, Styria • page xx xx Bathrooms with Stripes, interior conversion, 1982, Graz, Schillerstrasse; 1982, Vienna, Am Hof; 1983, Graz, Liebiggasse • page xx xx Housing Development St. Peter, competition, 1987, Graz • page xx xx Beyond Art, exhibition design, 1998, Antwerp, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst • page xx xx Housing Project for Hospital Employees, competition, 1990, Bruck/Mur, Styria Bit String, frozen image, 1994 • page xx xx Hybrid Architecture, computer design, 1981 • page xx xx Browse Architecture, poster, 1995 • page xx xx Hybrid Architecture: Plottegg Ironing Against the Separation of Functions (Hybridarchitektur: Plottegg bügelt gegen die Funktionstrennung), poster, 2003 • page xx xx Bruseum Concept, exhibition design, 2012, Graz, Universalmuseum Hyper-Hybrid Architecture Generator (Hyper-Hybrid-Architekturgenerator), installation, 2008, platform in Second Life • page xx xx Burggarten Orangery, study, 1994, Graz Hyper-Hybrid Architecture Generator, exhibition, 2008, Sevilla • page xx xx Business and Residential Park, competition, 2009, Graz, Waltendorf Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, exhibition design, 2002, Karlsruhe, Center for Art and Media • page xx xx Cash Desk, revitalization, 1992, Trautenfels Castle, Styria • page xx xx Identity : Difference, exhibition design, 1992, Graz, Burgring, Tummelplatz, Herrengasse, Hauptplatz, Sporgasse • page xx xx Cathedral of Intelligence, computer drawing, 1991 • page xx xx Identity : Difference, exhibition design, 1992, Graz, Künstlerhaus •­ page xx xx Cathedral of Intelligence, drawing, 2006 • page xx xx Inclusion : Exclusion, exhibition design, 1996, Graz, Reininghaus • page xx xx Cathedral of Intelligence, model, 2011 • page xx xx Inflatable Structures (Structures Gonflables), installation, 1968, Graz, University of Technology• page xx xx City Expansion Vienna South, competition, 1970, Vienna Intermedia Urbana, Trigon ’71, competition, 1971, Graz Clip-Clap Bathroom, interior conversion, 1990, Graz, Rieglgasse Irgang Housing Estate, Lawn Houses, planning/new construction, 2005, Jöss, Styria Collapsed Bed (Das zusammengebrochene Bett), object/installation, 1972, Graz, University of Technology • page xx xx Jagertratten Country House, renovation/conversion, 1996, Krakauhintermühlen, Styria College for Music and Musical Theater, competition, 1998, Graz Kalashnikov (soft version), object, 2009 • page xx xx Company Building, competition, 1986, Graz, Färberplatz • page xx xx Kunsthaus, competition, 2000, Graz • page xx xx Company Building, new construction, 1999, Graz, Kärntnerstraße Künstlerhaus, competition/refurbishment/functional changes, 2010, Graz Design Studio Exhibition 2010, exhibition design, 2010, Vienna, University of Technology • page xx xx Ladies’ and Men’s, interior conversion, 1992, Trautenfels Castle, Styria • 118 Digital Architecture Generator (Digitaler Architekturgenerator), exhibition, 1991, Amersfoort, De Zonnehof • page xx xx Ladies’ and Men’s at Café Korb (Damen und Herren im Café Korb), interior conversion, 2004, Vienna, Brandstätte, Café Korb • page xx xx District Commission Building, competition, 1996, Murau, Styria Lambert Country House, renovation/general refurbishment, 1977, Stiwoll, Styria Doors, revitalization, 1992, Trautenfels Castle, Styria • page xx xx Landesmuseum Joanneum, Depot, conversion, 1994, Graz Drawing Eraser (Zeichnerradierer), hybrid object/tool, 1970 • page xx xx Landmark for the future (Zeichen für Graz), competition, 1994, Graz ESG Center, competition, 1995, Linz Landscape Museum Trautenfels Castle, general refurbishment, 1990, Trautenfels Castle, Styria Event Halls for the State Medical Board of Registration, competition, 2000, Graz Landtrattner Country House, renovation/conversion, 1979, Krakauhintermühlen, Styria Exhibition Space Galerie & Edition Artelier, conversion, 2009, Graz, Hergottwiesgasse Lawn House (Wiesenhaus), project, 1994, Pernitz, Lower Austria • page xx xx Eybesfeld Castle Housing Project, new construction, 2003, Jöss, Styria • page xx xx Lawn House, competition, 1991, Graz, Eggenberg • page xx xx Eybesfeld Castle Housing Project, Green House, new construction, 2004, Jöss, Styria • page xx xx Line Seeking Concrete (Strich sucht Beton), prints, 1989, Graz, Haus der Architektur • page xx xx

274 275 Line Seeking Concrete, installation, 1989, Graz, Haus der Architektur • page xx xx Semaine de Cuir, competition, 1984, Paris • page xx xx Literaturhaus, competition, 2000, Graz • page xx xx Shop, conversion, 1982, Milan, Via Rubens Loft Conversion, new construction, 1987, Graz, Grazbachgasse • page xx xx Shop Window Campaign Nordsee II, installation, 1982, Vienna Main Square Design, competition, 1998, Feldkirchen, Carinthia Silberhof Country House, general refurbishment, 1976, Deutschfeistritz, Styria Mariahilf Event Center, project study, 1984, Graz Siteless, poster, 1996 • page xx xx Media Tower, revitalization, 1999, Graz, Hergottwiesgasse • page xx xx Spielberg Housing Development, computer-generated design, 1991, Spielberg, Styria • page xx xx Metamorphosis of a Town Flat (Metamorphose einer Stadtwohnung), installation/photomontage/drawing, 1972, Graz, University of Technology • page xx xx Spot the Difference, poster, 2007 • page xx xx Mirror Toilet (Spiegelklo), prototype, 1979, Vienna • page xx xx Startup Models, poster, 1995 • page xx xx Mixi 700 / Alpine Pagoda, model, 1999, Innsbruck, aut – Architektur und Tirol Steps or Door, revitalization, 1992, Trautenfels Castle, Styria • page xx xx Mr Faust Playing Roulette (Herr Faust spielt Roulette), proposal for a stage design, 1986, Vienna, Akademietheater • page xx xx STEWEAG Graz, competition, 1996, Graz Neuronal Architecture Generator (Neuronaler Architekturgenerator), installation, 1999—2004, Karlsruhe, Center for Art and Media, Graz, Neue Galerie • page xx xx Stone Lamp “Model Rudi Dutschke” (Low Cost Lamp 2) (Steinlampe “Modell Rudi Dutschke”), design/object, 1992, Trautenfels Castle, Styria • page xx xx Nordsee I, installation, 1979, Graz, steirischer herbst • page xx xx Styrian Yoga, film documentary, 1982, Graz, Forum Stadtpark• page xx xx Office Building, competition, 1989, Graz, Alberstraße The Architect as a Seismograph, statement, 1996 • page xx xx Olafur Eliasson, Surroundings Surrounded, exhibition design, 2000, Graz, Neue Galerie The Binary House (Das binäre Haus), generated architecture, 1988 • page xx xx One Pixel (Ein Pixel), drawing, 1994 • page xx xx The Binary House, poster, 1990 • page xx xx Orcus, exhibition design, 2003, Graz, Literaturhaus The Mescalin Paintings by Henri Michaux, exhibition design, 1998, Graz, Künstlerhaus Orcus, exhibition design, 2004, Vienna, Literaturhaus • page xx xx The Narrow World (pneumatic construction) (Die enge Welt), installation, 1968, Graz, University of Technology Palace Lugano, competition, 2000, Lugano, Switzerland The Plotteggs are coming, poster, 1995 • page xx xx Pécs, Capital of Culture, competition, 2007, Pécs, Hungary The Recipe for Recipes, cooking recipe, 2005 Penthouse, planning/loft conversion, 2010, Graz, Burgring The Solution of the Doric Corner Conflict in the Graz School of Architecture (La Soluzione del Problema dell’angolo nella scuola di Graz), poster, 1992 • page xx xx Phantom of Desire, exhibition design, 2003, Graz, Neue Galerie • page xx xx Theater an der Wien, Foyer, competition, 2005, Vienna Place a User’s Manual, exhibition design, 1995, Graz, Künstlerhaus • page xx xx Toilet Shower (Klodusche), prototype, 2012, Graz • page xx xx Plottegg’s Plots, poster, 2000 • page xx xx Toilet Swing (Kloschaukel), object, 1999, Graz • page xx xx Pneumatic, installation, 1997, Graz, Galerie & Edition Artelier • page xx xx Tower Staircase, revitalization, 1989, Trautenfels Castle, Styria • page xx xx Pneumatic, installation, 1998, Nice, Soardi Gallery • page xx xx Town Hall Center, competition, 1998, Eisenstadt Pneumatic, installation, 2000, Bregenz, Kunsthaus • page xx xx Trautenfels as seen by the components, film documentary/installation, 1993• page xx xx Pneumatic, installation, 1999, Salzburg, Rupertinum • page xx xx Travelling Tantra Altar, object, 1977 • page xx xx Portal and Bridge, new construction, 2007, Graz, Hergottwiesgasse Triangular Lamp (Low Cost Lamp 3), design/object, 1995 • page xx xx Postmedia Condition, exhibition design, 2005, Graz, Neue Galerie Trummelhof City Apartment, conversion, 1979, Vienna, Grinzing Provincial Capital St. Pölten, competition, 1989, St. Pölten, Lower Austria Tube Lamp (Low Cost Lamp 1), design/object, 1991 • page xx xx Public Toilet, project, 1994, Eisenstadt, Domplatz • page xx xx Typical Austrian Futon Construction, design/object, 1997, Graz, Neue Galerie, Vienna, MAK • page xx xx Puha Szimbolumok / Soft Symbols, competition, 2005, Budapest • page xx xx Urban E, Design Studio Exhibition 1999, installation, 1999, Vienna, University of Technology • page xx xx Putting Allspace in a Notshell, competition, 1969, Graz, Trigon ’69 • page xx xx Urn Cemetery Graz, competition/computer-generated drawing, 1985, Graz • page xx xx Putting Allspace in a Notshell, competition, 1969, Graz, Trigon ’69 • page xx xx Urn Cemetery Linz, competition/computer-generated drawing, 1999, Linz • page xx xx Putting Allspace in a Notshell, installation, 2012, Graz, Universalmuseum Joanneum, Kunsthaus • page xx xx VBH Retzhof Castle Guest House, competition, 2007, Leibnitz, Styria Putting Allspace in a Notshell, installation, 2012, Graz, Universalmuseum Joanneum, Kunsthaus • page xx xx video still.prn, prints, 1997, • page xx xx Regional Exhibition ’92, Pleasure & Pain (Lust & Leid), competition/exhibition design, 1992, Trautenfels Castle, Styria Villa Schilcher, conversion/annex, 2000, Graz, Rudolfstraße Regional Hospital, competition/conversion/annex, 1998, Knittelfeld, Styria Villa Hartenau, loft conversion, 1990, Vienna, Weimarer Straße Regional Vocational School, competition, 1992, Bad Gleichenberg, Styria Vivarium, competition, 1998, 2002, Neumarkt, Mariahof, Styria • page xx xx Regional Vocational School, planning of conversion/annex, 1993, Mureck, Styria Vocational School for Cooks and Waiters, study, 1990, Gleichenberg, Styria Residential Building, refurbishment/conversion, 2006, Graz, Eisengasse Vorläufer … precurseur … forerunner, design/object, 2010 • page xx xx Residential Building, revitalization, 1989, Ehrenhausen, Styria, Ehrenhausenstraße Vorläufer … precurseur … forerunner as Space Element, rendering, 2010, Cologne, Orgatec • page xx xx Residential Building, revitalization, 1989, Ehrenhausen, Styria, Volkmaierstraße Web of Life, installation, 2000, Karlsruhe, Center for Art and Media • page xx xx Residential Project, competition, 1992, Weiz, Styria Web of Life, installation, 2002, Brisbane, Bratislava, Rotterdam, Zagreb, Stuttgart, a. o. • page xx xx RESOWI Centre, University of Graz, competition/computer-generated design, 1985, Graz • page xx xx William Kentridge, exhibition design, 1999, Graz, Neue Galerie Rocker, edition, 2009, Graz, Artelier Contemporary • page xx xx WKO Conference and Event Hall, competition, 2010, Graz • page xx xx Rocker Prototype, design/object, 1967, Karlsruhe, Center of Technology • page xx xx Wood in Housing Construction, competition, 1984, Styria • page xx xx Schallhof Country House, general refurbishment, 1984, Pernitz, Lower Austria Zalloni Country House, general refurbishment, 1981, Stübing, Styria Secondary School, competition, 1988, Lustenau, Vorarlberg ZUGZOOMSCHÖNSCHNELL, installation, 1987, shown all over Austria • page xx xx Seiersberg Housing Development, project development/computer-generated design, 1987, Seiersberg, Styria • page xx xx Seiersberg Housing Development, construction, 1987, Seiersberg, Styria • page xx xx Seiersberg Housing Development, new construction, 1991, Seiersberg, Styria • page xx xx

276 277 Solo and Group Exhibitions 2000 Plottegg Plots 1980—2000, solo exhibition, Graz, Neue Galerie (cat.) Skulptur als Möbel – Möbel als Skulptur, Typical Austrian Futon Construction, Graz, Neue Galerie, curated by C. Steinle 2012 100 % Design, Vorläufer … precurseur … forerunner, London, Außenwirtschaft Österreich 1999 Salone Internazionale del Mobile, Vorläufer … precurseur … forerunner, Milano, Außenwirtschaft Österreich Zeichenbau / real virtualities, Neuronal Architecture Processor, Vienna, Künstlerhaus, curated by M. M. O. Wolff-Plottegg (cat.) medien . kunst . sammeln – Perspektiven einer Sammlung, Putting Allspace in a Notshell, Graz, Universalmuseum Joanneum, Kunsthaus, curated by G. Holler-Schuster, K. Huemer, K. Bucher Trantow Kogler & Plottegg, Pneumatic, Salzburg, Rupertinum

2011 1998 H. O. M. E. D. E. P. O.T., Vorläufer … precurseur … forerunner, Vienna, Semperdepot Kunst ohne Unikat, Tube Lamp (Licht mit Hirn, Licht hinter Gitter), Graz, Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, curated by P. Weibel, R. Schilcher (cat.) Kogler / Plottegg / Semotan, Pneumatic, Nice, Soardi Gallery 2010 Kogler & Plottegg, Pneumatic, Innsbruck, Widauer Gallery Pimp my chair, Forerunner, Berlin, AIT/Dietiker, St.-Johannes-Evangelist-Kirche Orgatec, Vorläufer … precurseur … forerunner, Cologne, furniture fair 1997 Kogler & Plottegg, Pneumatic, Graz, Galerie & Edition Artelier 2009 Architektur beginnt im Kopf / The Making of Architecture, Analoger Architekturgenerator, Vienna, Architekturzentrum, curated by E. Krasny (cat.) 1996 Generativní Architektury, solo exhibition, Prague, Austrian Cultural Forum Beyond Art, Analoger Architekturgenerator / Digital generierter Entwurf (RESOWI), Budapest, Ludwig Múzeum, 1996; Graz, Neue Galerie, 1997; Antwerp, Museum van Hedendagse Kunst, 1998 (cat.) Johnny’s Art Shop, Kalashnikov (soft version), Graz, Johnny-Weissmüller-Bund Sense of Architecture, Eybesfeld Castle Housing Project, Green House / Trautenfels, Graz, Künstlerhaus Graz, curated by C. Pöchhacker 1995 Kreuzungspunkt Linz. Junge Kunst und Meisterwerke, Tube Lamp (Licht mit Hirn), Linz, Lentos Kunstmuseum, curated by J. Schwanberg, D. Buchhart Architektur im 20. Jahrhundert, Seiersberg Housing Development / Trautenfels, Frankfurt, Deutsches Architekturmuseum (cat.) digital intuition — the design space for artificial learning, Neuronal Architecture Processor, London, nous gallery (cat.) 1993 2008 Architektur als Engagement, 3D Door, Door Steps Steps Door / Leoben Housing Development / Seiersberg Housing Development, Graz, Haus der Architektur (cat.) Youniverse, Generador Hiper Hibrido, Sevilla, BIACS, Bienal de Arte Contemporáneo de Sevilla, curated by P. Weibel, M. Brayer, W. Rhee (cat.) 30 × 2 Sessel/Stühle, ROCKER, Graz, Artelier Contemporary (cat.) 1992 Floating in Limbo / Zwischen Fließen und Schweben, Tube Lamp (Low Cost Lamp 2), Vienna, Designforum, curated by C. Knechtl Computer Graphics in the Fine Arts, Digital prints, Banská Bystrica, State Gallery Sense Of Architecture, Eybesfeld Castle Housing Project, Green House / Trautenfels, Venedig, La Biennale di Venezia, curated by C. Pöchhacker 1991 2007 The Binary Room, solo exhibition, Zagreb, CAD Forum Architektur in Wörtern, Zeitungsständer, Innsbruck, AUT – Architektur und Tirol, curated by G. Kaiser, K. Zweifel The Global Satellite, Digital Architecture Generator, Amersfoort, De Zonnehof Skulpturale Tendenzen und produktive Ambiguitäten, Eybesfeld Castle Housing Project, Green House / Trautenfels, Belgrad Muzej 25. Maj, Berlin, DAZ Deutsches Architektur Zentrum, curated by C. Pöchhacker Architektur 24/7 — Eine alltägliche Beziehung, Firefighters Museum, Graz, steirischer herbst, Haus der Architektur, curated by G. Heindl, M. Bogensberger (cat.) 1990 The Binary House, solo exhibition, Munich, Architekturgalerie (cat.) 2006 Spazio deformato, Neuronal Architecture Processor, Rom, ArteScienza 2006, curated by P. Weibel 1989 ArteScienza 2006, Web of Life / Neuronal Architecture Processor, Rom, Casa dell’Architettura, curated by P. Weibel (cat.) Peripherie, Line Seeking Concrete, Graz, Haus der Architektur Sie nannten ihn Medienkünstler, Cathedral of Intelligence, Graz, Galerie Edition Artelier 1987 2005 Zug der Züge, ZUGZOOMSCHÖNSCHNELL, Austria, ÖBB (Austrian Railway) Light Art from Artificial Light, Tube Lamp (Low Cost Lamp 2), Karlsruhe, Center for Art and Media, curated by P. Weibel (cat.) Täglich frische Bits und Pixel, solo exhibition, Graz, Forum Stadtpark Österreichische Architektur im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert, Seiersberg Housing Development, Vienna, Architektur Zentrum (cat.) mental images, Neuronal Architecture Processor, Baden-Baden, Südwestrundfunk, curated by P. Weibel 1982 Styrian Yoga, movie presentation, solo exhibition, Graz, Forum Stadtpark 2004 The Austrian Phenomenon, Collapsed Bed / Inflatable Structures, Vienna, Architektur Zentrum, curated by J. Porsch, K. Ritter 1981 Algorithmic Revolution, Neuronal Architecture Processor, Karlsruhe, Center for Art and Media, curated by P. Weibel Architektur aus Graz, Hybrid Architecture, Graz, Künstlerhaus (cat.) Reserve der Form, 3D Door, Door Steps Steps Door, Vienna, Künstlerhaus, curated by K. Stattmann (cat.) 1979 2002 Shop Windows by Artists / L’art vitrinale, Nordsee I, Graz, steirischer herbst, curated by P. Weibel (cat.) Die Rückkehr der Kommunikation, artlounge, Vienna, Café Korb 1968 2001—2003 Grazer Schule, Inflatable Structures, Graz, Forum Stadtpark Web of Life, Architecture, Karlsruhe, Center for Art and Media (cat.)

278 279 Books 1997 “Architekturalgorithmen,” in Jenseits von Kunst, ed. P. Weibel, Passagen Verlag, Vienna Architecture … Scripting, Vienna, Sonderzahl, 2011, ed. by C. Derix, C. Falkner, T. Grasl, M. Wolff-Plottegg, and R. Thum “Építészeti algoritmusok,” in A müvészeten túl, ed. P. Weibel, Ludwig Múzeum, Budapest Hybridarchitektur & Hyperfunktionen, Vienna, Passagen Verlag, 2006 Architekturalgorithmen, Vienna, Passagen Verlag, 1996 1996 “Binary House,” “Nordsee,” “I:D,” “Notshell,” in Styrian Window, ed. Ch. Steinle and A. Foitl, Droschl, Graz “Der Ort, Die Nichtidentität, Das Echo der Berge,” in Bau – Kultur – Region. Regionale Identität im wachsenden Europa – das Fremde, ed. E. Köb, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Österreichischer Kunst- und Kulturverlag, Vienna and New York Selected Contributions to Books “Fransenbad,” in Bauen für die Sinne. Gefühl, Erotik und Sexualität in der Architektur, ed. C. Thomsen, Prestel, Vienna and New York

1995 2013 “La possibilitá delle forme – dal computer all’architettura,” in Luoghi, 02, ed. S. Giovanazzi, Circolo Trentino per l’architettura contemporanea, Trento “Mit Haltung in Käfighaltung,” in trans 22: Haltung, ed. transRedaktion, gta publishers, Verlag ETH Zürich, Zurich

2012 “A City is not a Tree ... A Faculty is not a Kindergarten,” in Stadt : Gestalten, ed. Fakultät für Architektur und Raumplanung, Springer, Vienna and New York Selected Contributions to Magazines “Die Grazer Schule ist ein Fake,” in Was bleibt von der Grazer Schule?, ed. A. Wagner, A. Senerclens de Grancy, Institut für Architekturtheorie, Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften, Jovis, Berlin

2008 2012 “Die Welt des Sessels ist nicht die Welt des Sitzens,” in 30 × 2 Sessel/Stühle, ed. R. Schilcher, Artelier Collection, Literaturverlag Droschl, Graz “Digital und noch immer analog | Eine Zwischenbilanz,” in KONstruktiv, 286, Vienna “All Inclusive & Interrupt,” in New Realities: Being Syncretic, ed. R. Ascot, G. Bast, W. Fiel, M. Jarmann, and R. Schnell, Springer, Vienna and New York 2003 2007 “Hybridarchitektur,” in ST/A/R Städteplanung / Architektur / Religion, Vienna “Typical Austrian Futon Construction,” in Lessons from Bernard Rudofsky. Life as a Voyage, ed. Architektur Zentrum, Birkhäuser, Basel “Die Kunst des Machens,” in KONstruktiv, 239, Vienna

2006 2002 “--- ,I, --- ( ) ---,” in Découverture, 27, ed. BIL BO K, Magazine des errances contemporaines, Paris “Architecture as Information Editor,” in Telematik, 01, Graz

2005 2000 “Besser als der gute Geschmack es verdaut. Das Rezept für Rezepte,” in Allegro ma non troppo, ed. I. Werner, Literaturverlag Droschl, Graz “Urban Entertainment,” in Architektur & Bau FORUM, 207, Vienna “Quick and Dirty,” in Beyond Art — A Third Culture, ed. P. Weibel, Springer Verlag, Vienna and New York “DAMEN & HERREN im Café Korb,” in Jahrbuch der Architektur, 04/05, ed. Haus der Architektur, Haus der Architektur Graz, Graz 1999 “Keine heiße Asche einfüllen!,” in Architektur & Bau FORUM, 203, Vienna 2004 “Real Virtualities,” in Architektur & Bau FORUM, 202, Vienna “… seit ich nicht mehr male, geht es mir besser …,” in Hans Kupelwieser, ed. Ch. Steinle, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern-Ruit “Im Corollarium Cornucopiae – offensichtlich,” in 05-03-44: Liebesgrüße aus Odessa, ed. E. Bonk, P. Gente and M. Rosen, Merve, Berlin 1991 “Die synthetische Dimension,” in BauJournal, 12, Vienna 2001 “Updating Transformating Principles in Architecture,” in Surroundings Surrounded. Essays on Space and Science, ed. P. Weibel and O. Eliasson, The MIT Press, Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe 1990 “Neuronal Architecture Processor. How to Generate Architecture Directly out of Neuronal Spikes,” in Defining Digital Architecture, ed. Yu-Tung Liu, Dialogue Magazine, Meei Jaw Publishing Co, Taipei “The Binary House & Interaction,” in Arteficiele Intuitie, Rotterdam “Zero. Identity / Speed / Fake,” in Alpbacher Architekturgespräche, ed. ATP Achammer, Europäisches Forum Alpbach, Innsbruck “From Object to Procedure,” in City Fights: Debates on Urban Sustainability, ed. M. Hewitt and S. Hagan, James & James, London

2000 Selected Lectures “Dekonstruktion bzw. Paranoia: Vom Determinismus zu einer offenen Architektur,” in Paranoia und Diktatur. Versuch einer Analyse der pluralistischen Gesellschaft, ed. H. G. Zapotoczky and K. Fabisch, Universitätsverlag, Linz 2012 1998 “Architektur aus Sicht der Bauteile” (“Architecture as Seen by the Components”, MediaLab Lecture Series), Vienna, University of Technology “Der Demiurg. Die Kontingenz. Das Surfen,” in eigentlich könnte alles auch anders sein, ed. P. Zimmermann, Walther König, Cologne “Sur le lien entre architecture et philosophie“ (“Die Architektur und die Philosophie in der Vergangenheit und in der Zukunft”), Vienna, Salon du livre francophone “Schloß Trautenfels,” in Dialogues in Time: New Graz Architecture, ed. P. Blundell Jones, Haus der Architektur Graz, Graz 2010 “Die Grazer Schule ist ein Fake” (international symposium), Graz, University of Technology

280 281 2009 1998 “Zum Nachsalzen … Rezept für Rezepte > Methoden n-ter Ordnung” (“raum&designstrategien”), Linz, University of Art and Design “Surf Surface Architecture,” Hamburg, Hochschule für bildende Künste “Functionalism beyond separation of functions: hyper- & hybrid-functions,” London, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL “Browse Architecture / beta version 2.1,” Prague, Academy of Fine Arts

2008 1997 “Am anderen Ort … in anderer Verwendung,” Bolzano, Freie Universität “Autocatalytic Architecture,” London, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL “Zur Fertilität von Verflechtungen der Sprache,” Innsbruck, AUT — Architektur und Tirol “Triple Lecture: The Making of Architecture > Designing Design > Advanced Planning Methods,” London, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL 1996 “Triple Lecture: Hybrid Architecture & Hyper-Functions,” London, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL “Ortlos. Zum Diskurs der Dislokation in der Architektur,” Innsbruck, University, Institut für experimentellen Hochbau “011001010101100110010010100001011101100010001010010,” Weimar, Bauhausuniversität 1993 2007 “Maintaining the order of procedure” (“Architecture Unbound: Computers and the New Complexity”), New York “Hybridarchitektur – Plottegg bügelt gegen die Funktionstrennung” (“Hybrid Architecture: Plottegg Ironing Against the Separation of Functions”), Berlin, Universität der Künste “La soluzione del problema d’angolo nella Scuola di Graz,” Trento, Circolo d’Architettura Contemporanea “Bauen heißt ordnen, wohnen heißt aufräumen,” Graz, Gesellschaft und Ökologie “Ich fordere eine positive Verdeckungsbilanz,” Salzburg, Bauakademie 1990 “An inventory of forms, invented by computer,” Glasgow, University of Strathclyde 2006 “Überautochthon und überarchetypisch,” Innsbruck, AUT — Architektur und Tirol “Triple Lecture: Hybrid Architecture & Hyper-Functions,” London, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL “Generative Systems — Functions & Hybrids,” London, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL Selected Reviews on Plottegg’s Work

2005 “Dortmund Essen Darmstadt Klosterneuburg — eine gastrosophische/gastrophobische Exploration,” Vienna, Café Korb Broekmann, R., “Veränderungen planen,” in build, 02, 2011 Chramosta, W., “Grimmi(n)ge(r) Gegenkodierungen,” in Architektur & Bau FORUM, 152, 1992 2004 Derix, Ch., “Neuronal Architecture,” in Building Design, 2005 “Hybrid Architecture,” London, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL Feuerstein, C., “Gesellschaft & Ökologie — Generationen Wohnen,” in Altern im Stadtquartier. Formen und Räume im Wandel, 2008 Feuerstein, G., “The Binary House,” in Urban Fiction, 2008 2003 Gross, E., “Landschaftsmuseum Schloss Trautenfels,” in Architektur Steiermark, 2005 “Generative Systems III,” London, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL Hawlik, M., “Flexibler Wohnen,” in VIA International, 01, 2008 Hötzl, M., “Der Architekt als Funktionserfinder,” in Architektur & Bau FORUM, July 13, 2007 2002 Krasny, E., “Mit allen Medien gewaschen,” in Die Presse, September 29, 2007 “Architektur jenseits von Inklusion und Identität ist Exklusion und Differenz von Kunst” (“Architecture beyond Inclusion and Identity is Exclusion and Difference from Art”), Graz, Neue Galerie Kühn, Ch., “Nur keine Handschrift, bitte!,” in Die Presse / Spectrum, December 20, 1997 Marboe, I., “Rocker reloaded. Evolutionäres Sitzen,” in architektur. aktuell, 11, 2010 2001 Marboe, I., “Neue Medien, neue Räume,” in KONstruktiv, 2009 “escapism & excess in architecture and urbanism — design algorithms & superdensity,” London, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL Marboe, I., “Aufblasen und Absaugen,” in architektur. aktuell, 05, 2008 “Faking Architectural Identities,” London, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL Nimmervoll, L., “Über den Unterschied zwischen Unis und Oper,” in Der Standard, March 30, 2010 “20010621 fake” (“Sprechen über Architektur”), Vienna, ZV Silhan, A., “Architektur und mediale Umwelt,” in Wiener Zeitung, September 27, 2007 Steger, B., “Hybridarchitektur,” in Architektur & Bau FORUM, April 16, 2007 2000 Steinle, C., “Putting allspace in a notshall,” in Rewind / Fast Forward, Neue Galerie Graz, 2009 “The Ethical Function of Architecture,” Innsbruck, University Tabor, J., “Sinnlichkeit im Keller,” in Falter, 30, 2004 “Architecture # Media > Architecture # Hypermedia,” London, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL Thun, B., “Pflanzenhaus,” inArchitektur, February 01, 2007 “The Graz Plot,” London, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL Titz, W., “Wohnbau GGW-Seiersberg,” in Architektur Graz, 2003 “Prototype Projects,” London, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL Tschavgova, K., “Vom Fordern und Bereichern,” in Die Presse / Spectrum, July 01, 2007 “Generative Systems II,” London, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL Waldinger, I., “Zeitmesser Fassade,” in Architektur & Bau FORUM / SKIN, 01, 2007 “Arquitectura e Multimédia,” Porto, Universidade Católica Portuguesa Woltron, U., “Bauen im Datenstrom,” in Der Standard, December 19, 2000 “Architecture & Hypermedia,” Venice, La Biennale di Venezia Woltron, U., “Der computergenerierte Wal hat einen Auspuff,” in Der Standard, May 29, 1999 “Wie Bits & Bytes unsere Wohn- und Lebenswelt ändern,” Vienna, Siemensforum

1999 “Forward Planning: Subject and Object Disabled — No Settings” (Symposium “Zur Physik der Kunst”), Graz, Steirischer Herbst “Keine heiße Asche einfüllen” (“No hot ash!”), Linz, Architekturforum Oberösterreich “Generative Systems I,” London, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL

282 283 Thanks to Copyrights Publisher’s Note

Lukas Antoni, EDP programming In case that not all copyright holders could be contacted despite all efforts to do so, Editor: Manfred Wolff-Plottegg Armin Blasbichler, office staff claims will be settled along the usual lines upon request. Author: Joseph Giovannini Arne Böhm, office staff Graphic design: Florian Jungwirth, DYNAMOWIEN

Alfred Boric, office staff Proofreading: Wolfgang Astelbauer, Stefan Schwar, ad literam Archiv der Neuen Galerie Graz — Universalmuseum Joanneum • page xx xx Harald Burgsteiner, EDP programming Translations: Wolfgang Astelbauer, Yplus David Auner • page xx xx Giovanna Crisci, office staff Scans, image editing: LOOK Piculjan GmbH Tom Fürstner • page xx xx Georg Giebeler, office staff Printed by: Peter Kogler • page xx xx Michael Grobbauer, office staff Paper: Hans Kupelwieser • page xx xx Georg Gröller, analyst Type: Klavika und Swift Neue Williams Larry • page xx xx Andreas Gruber, architect, EDP programming •page xx xx Paul Ott • page xx xx © Manfred Wolff-Plottegg, Lichtenfelsgasse 13, 8010 Graz, Austria Peter Helweger †, architect wikimedia •page xx xx Monograph, 288 pages, 350 pictures and plans, 280 � 240 mm, hardcover with linen Michael Homann, office staff All other Images: Architekturbüro Plottegg Martin Huth, installations Published by: Niko Kastner, installations Orhan Kipcak, informatics Sponsored by: Peter Kogler, artist • page xx xx TU Wien, Fakultät für Architektur und Raumplanung Peter Kompolschek, office staff Land Steiermark, Abteilung 9 Kultur Wolfgang Kreilinger, office staff Stadt Graz, Kulturabteilung Sabine Krischan, office staff Hans Kupelwieser, artist • page xx xx All rights reserved, including translation, photomechanical reproduction, and reprints of parts of the work Wolfgang Maas, informatics • page xx xx Fritz Mascher, architect • page xx xx Gerhard Polzer, office staff Alexander Putz, office staff Jeffrey Shaw, artist • page xx xx Hartmut Skerbisch †, artist • page xx xx Johannes Sperlhofer, EDP programming Peter Szammer, EDP programming Michael Tritthart, associate 1977—1983 Peter Weibel, artist, curator • page xx xx Petra Winterheller, office staff Rainer Wührer, office staff Christoph Zechner, architect • page xx xx Martin Zechner, architect • page xx xx Finn Zeder, office staff Peter Zimmermann, artist • page xx xx

Special Thanks to

Joseph Giovannini, author

284 285 biography Manfred Wolff-Plottegg

Manfred Wolff-Plottegg is an Austrian architect, born in Schöder, Styria in 1946. He studied at the Graz University of Technology, the Paris Académie des Beaux-Arts, and the Salzburg Summer Academy, graduating in 1974. Since 1983 he has been teaching (design, designing methods, computing/ Caad) at various universities, including the Graz University of Technol­ogy, the Linz Design School, Innsbruck University, and Munich Technical University. He has given guest lectures in academies and universities all over Europe. From 2001 to 2011 he was Professor for Building Theory & Design and the Head of Institute for Architecture & Design at Vienna’s University of Technology. He has run his own architectural practice as registered architect since 1983, his portfolio includes revitalizations (a. o. of castles), social housing, interiour design, object design, exhibition design, and even contributions to applied art and media art. His methodological and conceptual way of working combines building, prototype production, theory, and art. Since the beginnings of computer-aided design he has been one of the leading experts in generating architectural algorithms (first and second order) as one of the main representatives of the Austrian architectural avant-garde. Digital Architecture Processor, Neuronal Architecture Processor, and Hyper-Hybrid Processor rank among the architect’s most outstanding achievements. He took part in many trend-setting art and architecture exhibitions such as The Global Satellite (Zonnehof/Amersfoort, 1991), Real Virtualities (Vienna, 1999), Web of Life (ZKM Karlsruhe, 2002), The Algorithmic Revolution (ZKM Karlsruhe, 2004), and the Bienal de Arte Contemporáneo de Sevilla (2008). He has taken part in numerous competitions and received prices such as the International Media Award for Science and Art, the Austrian Concrete Construction Prize, the Geramb Award for Good Design, the Architecture­ Prize of Styria and the Austrian Aluminium Architecture Prize. Essential part of his work are theoretical writings and lectures. His books include Architecture … Scripting (Sonderzahl, Vienna, 2011), Hybrid­architektur & Hyper­ funktionen (Passagen Verlag, Vienna, 2007), Architekturalgorithmen (Passagen Verlag, Vienna, 1996), and Das binäre Haus (Architekturgalerie, Munich, 1989). He has published numerous articles in leading architectural magazines.

286 287 Readme1st The Always Other Plan by Manfred Wolff-Plottegg

The selection of works assembled in this publication shows concepts and developments rather than the accomplishment of building tasks. Descriptions are reduced to data and a few indispensable rudimentary comments. Especially minor projects have been included since developments can be more clearly defined and are more easily to read in these finger exercises and back-breaking graft.

The present volume provides a nonverbal version of, or visual evidence for, the author’s theoretical books Architekturalgorithmen, Hybridarchitektur & Hyperfunktionen, and Architecture … Scripting, which offer more comprehensive descriptions of the projects. The order of the projects is neither chronological nor by subject or color, but random, strung together without any cross-references to contexts. Non-sequential reading recommends itself when browsing through this book.

The genesis of the projects is algorithmic, analog, or digital in its conception. Morphing generally suspends the category of separation. The context of the always other plan sees an automatic invention, negation, or reversal of (traditional) architectural rules, detached from white modernism by deconstruction. The approach is beyond the mentality of reconstruction, is a methodically independent electronic/digital/media process. Without providing a reason for doing so, architectural delusion pragmatically aims at rupture, at opposition, at the exact other.

One of the recurrent algorithms is “in another place, used in another way”: instead of the site (topos), non-site (atopos) and heterotopia feature prominently here, replacing the realism of the locale. This is why, methodically speaking, building elements and materials have no specific place. In the realm of dislocation, functions are no longer separated and localized. By using them in another way the primacy of clarity gives way to the primacy of contingency.

Similarly, creativity becomes detached from the artist’s position (his brains, bowels, elbow, little finger, and footfall), is shifted to external algorithms and the computer’s CPU, released into the sphere of écriture automatique. The acceleration of the outsourced production becomes increasingly faster, turns into a quick- and-dirty. Planning determinism and specifically optimized use are replaced by uncertainty.

The basic constituents are not stone, wood, steel, or membranes any longer, but binary codes, Hex, ASCII — machine languages are multilingual. Virtual or real, the representations go as far as real virtuality — virtual is real. The works modulate data, line, plan, model, cement, or concrete, wander between different media, extend the scale up to 1:1, heterogeneous and postmedial, who or what. Algorithms supersede archetypes, rituals, opinions, attitudes. Everything has different identities. Architecture unfolds as information processing in a variety of manifestations, appearances, and editors.

Subjects are modified in different generators. The repeated use of the same material in different configu­ rations and applications articulates the differences and visualizes limit pictures. Their overlapping, blending, and morphing are methodical and conceptual actions without an aim, independent of the project in question, independent of the input:

Architecture beyond Inclusion and Identity is Exclusion and Difference from Art.

288 289 “I’m not a designer, I just change rules.”

With this quote from the architect and artist at issue the author Joseph Giovannini begins his introduction to the visual documentation of Manfred Wolff-Plottegg’s complex and extensive work. The computer-generated title of the book Architecture beyond Inclusion and Identity is Exclusion and

Plottegg—Architecture beyond Inclusion and Identity is Exclusion and Difference from Art Plottegg—Architecture beyond Inclusion and Identity is Exclusion Difference Difference from Art suggests a shift in paradigms from the expressive, derivative, auratic to a Cagean approach of accidental events.

Joseph Giovannini is a critic, architect, and teacher based in New York. Trained at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, he has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine, Architect magazine, and Architectural Record, and has taught at Columbia, Harvard, UCLA, USC, and SCI-Arc.