In November 1967, at the height of the Space Race, a massive transparent sphere composed of a steel frame and PVC airbags began inflating on a building facade 10 meters above the streets of Vienna. At its center, two seats offered a bird’s-eye view of the streets and crowds below. This spaceship-like installation marked the debut collaborative work of the avant-garde architecture-art collective Haus-Rucker-Co (HRC), founded by Günter Zamp Kelp (1941–), Laurids Ortner(1941–), Klaus Pinter (1940–), and Manfred Ortner (1943–), all recent graduates of the University of Vienna’s architecture program (the fifth member, artist Caroll Michels, joined in 1972). The group’s name is said to derive from the Hausruck Mountains in Upper Austria, the region where the four members were born.
HRC was founded to advance architecture, deepen environmental thinking, and “connect”cultural landscapes through experimental attempts blending architecture,sculpture, and design. Since the 1970s, its focus has gradually shifted toward environmental pollution and natural disasters, evolving from captivating individual masks called “Environment Transformers” (1968) to site-specific projects such as “Cover - Survival in a Polluted Environment” (1971), which involved covering a museum building with a giant inflatable dome. HRC’s work maintains a transparent, improvisational, installation-based approach, building upon the utopian ideals of predecessors like the Situationist International(1957-1972), Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), and Archigram (1960s-). This synthesis crystallized into uniquely inspiring architectural works that subsequently influenced renowned contemporary artists, including Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson (1967-) and Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno (1973-).
Published in conjunction with the eponymous exhibition at Berlin’s Haus am Waldsee—a major contemporary arts center— held in 2014 and 2015, this book revisits HRC’s creative journey through original drawings, archival materials, and interviews with group members. Their pioneering spatial and installation design series, including interactive masks, such as the “Mind-Expander” and “pneumaticair-structures,” resonate profoundly with today’s pandemic-stricken global atmosphere, offering particularly thought-provoking reflections.
