PRITZKER PRIZE GOES TO AUSTRIAN

The 1985 Pritzker Architecture Prize has been awarded to Hans Hollein, a relatively obscure Austrian designer known as much for his exhibitions and interiors as his architecture.

Carrying with it a tax-free grant of $100,000 and a Henry Moore sculpture, the prize is considered the profession’s most prestigious award and certainly its most coveted.

The award last year to Richard Meier of New York was said to be one of the factors that earned him the hotly contested commission to design a museum and fine arts center in Brentwood for the J. Paul Getty Trust.

Since its establishment in 1979 by the Hyatt Foundation, the prize also has been considered in design circles as somewhat conservative, favoring the more prominent, prolific and socially acceptable architects, such as Philip Johnson and I. M. Pei, winners in 1979 and 1983, respectively.

That persistent criticism seems to have been answered this year with the selection of the 51-year-old, Vienna-born Hollein, who has few buildings to his credit and, despite being recognized as one of the world’s more influential designers, has published little.

In its citation, an international jury described Hollein as “an architect who is also an artist . . . who with wit and eclectic gusto draws upon the traditions of the New World as readily as upon those of the Old.”

Hollein also was praised by the jury as a “superb teacher, who urges the young by his example to take big chances, and yet making sure that the design remains of paramount importance, not the designer.”

Brendan Gill, a writer and secretary to the jury, added that Hollein was “that comparatively rare thing in contemporary architecture, an artist-architect, combining great technical prowess with a gift for astonishing the eye. His buildings, like his drawings, have a playful seductiveness. One is happy in their presence.”

Hollein’s most famous architectural commission is the Municipal Museum Abteiberg at Moenchen-Gladbach, near Duesseldorf, West Germany. Completed in 1982, the museum has been described as an eclectic piece of sculpture, combining a variety of materials and styles but somehow maintaining a logic that works for the art it houses and the neighborhood.

Judging from plans and photographs, the design is exquisite. It also defies any flip categorization, such as late modern or post-modern. In this sense, Hollein is very much the independent, ignoring the architectural showmanship that clouds much of the current discussions concerning style.

Factor in Later Wins

The design of the museum garnered much praise for Hollein in various architectural publications, the German Architecture Award for 1983 and no doubt was a factor in his winning two subsequent international competitions--for a Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt, now under construction, and a cultural forum in Berlin, as well as a commission for an apartment complex, also in Berlin.

Also impressive have been various exhibitions he has designed--most recently two involving the history of Vienna and shows in New York and San Francisco of his work as an artist--and the interior designs of select stores. These have included the Schullin jewelry shops and the Austrian tourist office in Vienna, with each design displaying in photographs and plans Hollein’s uncanny use of materials.

The only work beyond exhibitions, art pieces and products that Hollein has executed in the United States (and that I have seen) is a shop for Beck in New York City. Unfortunately, it is tucked away amid the glitz of Trump Tower, a sort of Rodeo Drive-in-the-sky on Fifth Avenue, and seemed lost in the glare.

Frequent U.S. Visitor

Hollein has spent a considerable time in the United States. A Harkness Fellowship after his graduation in 1956 from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna allowed him to study with Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and with Frank Lloyd Wright in Wisconsin, eventually receiving a master of architecture degree from UC Berkeley in 1960. His teaching positions have included visiting professorships at Washington University in St. Louis and Yale University.

Though the announcement of the prize was made at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where Hollein was presented with a check, the formal ceremony investing Hollein as the Pritzker laureate will be held at the Huntington Library and Art Galleries in San Marino next month.

The decision to hold the ceremonies in Los Angeles was seen as a gesture to lift the award out of the often parochial architectural community of New York City and make it more of an international event.

The jury this year was chaired by J. Carter Brown, director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and included Giovanni Agnelli, chairman of Fiat Motors; J. Irwin Miller, chairman of the Cummins Engine Co. of Columbus, Ohio; Thomas Watson, former chairman of IBM, and architects Ricardo Legorreta of Mexico City, Fumihiko Maki of Tokyo and Kevin Roche of Hamden, Conn.