Coop Himmelb(l)au
Dazzling architecture

25 years ago, Wolf D. Prix and Helmut Swiczinsky, co-founders of the Austrian architectural firm Coop Himmelb(l)au, announced they wanted "an architecture that exhausts, shines, distorts, and why not breaks".

Their name "Building the sky" was perfectly chosen to define an architecture being "so transient, full of contrast, movable, changeable, aerial and as free as the clouds themselves". Ever since 1968, their architectural expression exceeding all standards, aims at symbolising movement in an obstinate way. The energy manifests itself in irregular structures or use of volume-breaking diagonal beams in order to free space. Even in case of renovation of the roof of a traditional Vienna flat building (1988), a full asymmetric metal and glass structure rips up the roof like a transparent arch. The preference shown for a disrupted geometry avoiding each impression of balance expresses the will of both leading actors in their repertory of shapes to create buildings designed as signs, as sculptures. According to this significance, deconstrutivism of Coop Himmelb(l) would rather be a philosophic trend.

The cinema complex in Dresden is designed as an urban space in an approach to the principle "design and shape". A duality expressing "an essential simultaneousness for future architecture". The apartment building in Vienna (1994-200) breaks the image of traditional, closed-in residential buildings and consists of open volumes, such as air pockets present in this structure. The "Musée des Confluences" in Lyon is still under construction and is considered to be a public space. Upon encouraging a direct and active use, architects fixed an urban meeting place rousing the public curiosity. A landscape of sloping surfaces and fields penetrating one another creates a succession of dynamic events in space.