Plottegg – Architecture Beyond Inclusion and Identity is Exclusion and Difference from Art: The Work of Manfred Wolff-Plottegg 9783035607420, 9783035609165

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
Works
Appendix
Biography Manfred Wolff-Plottegg
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Plottegg — Architecture beyond Inclusion and Identity is Exclusion and Difference from Art The Works of Manfred Wolff-Plottegg

Plottegg —Architecture beyond Inclusion and Identity is Exclusion and Difference from Art The Works of Manfred Wolff-Plottegg

Manfred Wolff-Plottegg (Ed.) Birkhäuser Basel

Contents

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

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Works

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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

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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 unmistakably 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 temperament. 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,

museums, public spaces and into competitions, as his acts of calibrated resistance drew an audience and even a clientele. Many of his installations, interventions and speculations amounted to intellectual parables that embodied an idea or a position. The provo­cations usually elicited a smile in what were, on some level, genial versions of Ghandhian acts of passive resistance. The pattern assumed a whole new level of seriousness when he applied his counterintuitive logic to architecture conceived on the computer. What had been disruption by concept became disruption by the new technology. He was early to the table when he theorized the computer’s potential impact on the design process. The computer did not create an either/or choice between the analog and digital worlds but a both/and that bridged them. A gentle rather than angry subversive who tended to humor rather than strident orthodoxy, Plottegg has been one of the most productive, original and serious minds of his generation, always encouraging radical ways of theorizing the field. He never proposed a totalizing manifesto that packaged a new architecture within a single idea. Early on he deployed catastrophe theory to precipitate new alignments; he used mirrors to challenge perspective, and then the computer to do the same; he speculated on randomness as a means of erasing the signature of the architect; he hypothesized a self-catalytic architecture; he looked at buildings as lenses through which to see and act in the world differently. Plottegg saw differently because he thought differently. No single idea dominated his discourse. His continuously evolving critique kept his own theoretical positions off balance without ever coalescing into a single point of view. His parables were all about non-linearity. In a century characterized by scientific, social and political uncertainty, he eschewed the determinism of closed systems in favor of open systems, opting out of “normal” Newtonian physics that packaged everything neatly in favor of the quantum physics of Heisenberg, in which the universe is based on probabilities. He steered clear of the idea that something must last forever, including the Platonic essentialism of modernism. He has spent a career opening architecture as a system of thought rather than closing it with fixed rules, lasting truths and single-issue definitions. Such was the intensity of his inventive proposals that they never became boxes of new constraints built around the boxes he broke. 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, and as it descended from Hoffmann and Loos, was being challenged—as was what Plottegg called the “fascist” systems theories of the 1960s, which separated functions to optimize efficiency. Architectural historicism was also on the horizon.

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Students found themselves confronting mixed messages as they prepared for a field whose basis was being challenged and undermined. In Austria, as in many national architectural cultures, many architects and students staged installations against what was then considered the heroic Modernism of the movement’s founding fathers, in what was essentially an Oedipal reaction during the 1960s and 1970s to theory that had become theology. The disputes were often mounted by small one-man practices, and they were not orchestrated but happened episodically outside any linear historical progression. Plottegg’s restive provocations occurred in the transitional period during the breakdown of an older paradigm shifting to new, as yet-undetermined ground. Architecture’s collective unconscious was restructuring itself. Plottegg staged his events at a time when Austrian architects such as Coop Himmelb(l)au, Haus-Rucker-Co, and Zünd-Up participated in a critique called Actionism (Aktionismus), that formed an Austrian tributary into the broader international streams of the newly emergent cultural postmodernism (not co-extensive with architecture’s “historical post-modernism”). Architects participating in the devel­opment, along with artists and polemicists, initiated critiques in the form of manifestoes, installations, performances, and interventions. In Graz Plottegg was a one-man island, perhaps, but an island within a larger archipelago that stretched beyond Vienna to London and to the U.S., forming an inchoate body of protest against the status quo. Not one critique, whatever its form, said it all, but collectively the critique established an irreversible momentum contesting the received wisdom and practice of Modernism. After the student events of 1968, whose cultural effects rippled across the continent for years during politicized and radicalized times, the avant-garde de-architecturalized the reigning Modernist epistemology in order to de-structure, open and invade it. The field was atomized, redefining itself. Plottegg, a natural radical, was a student of the zeitgeist, but his attitude belonged to his character as well as in his youth. Long after others defected to more conventional practices, culturally and professionally absorbed, or dropped out al­­together, Plottegg persisted. Graz itself was a active nexus in the cultural and architectural debates, and Plottegg’s proposals, part and parcel of the scene there, persisted long after the scene subsided. His experiments continued in Graz and elsewhere. The young Turk remained a Turk. Intimations of architectural uncertainties appeared early in Plottegg’s career when, in 1972, for a course in furniture design at the Graz University of Technology, he collapsed a bed: he set up conditions to precipitate a spontaneous breakdown “without even 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

mono-functional bed, form following function, as in a single or double, or a Hollywood “heart” bed or one that vibrates, Plottegg was proposing a hybrid bed whose unpredictable deformation would provoke unpredictable functions. Plottegg advocated collapse because it was not a reflective process determined a priori by expressions of language, images or theory, but by a direct and spontaneous (though somewhat manipulated) action-event. The originally neutral surface of the bed acquired, after collapsing, a diversified and intense topography that Plottegg (coyly) said could be activated by the new seating and sleeping positions its forms encouraged. He was not simply multi­plying functions, as with a Swiss army knife, which is multifunctional (but with only one function at a time), but a hybrid bed in which different functions can take place at the same time on a topography that suggests different, perhaps new uses. “I’m not designing, I’m not thinking, I’m acting,” he said, referring to the tenets of Actionism. His beginnings, then, are highly independent and teasingly naughty, a complex attitude that has continued since. The naughtiness, however, was not gratuitous: he always pursued a point, and a serious point, in his investigations. Tellingly, with the bed, he ceded control over the outcome. In a related installation done about the same time, Metamorphosis of a Town Flat, Plottegg draped a water-resistant tarp over conventional furniture in a conventional room, forming a substratum of soil for an interior terrarium. The installation recalled the work of land artists, who eschewed galleries, and the conceptual installations of artists like Walter De Maria, who did earth rooms in Germany and New York in the late 1960s and 1970s. The term “design” derives from the Italian verb segnare—“to sign”—and implies the hand and signature of the artist. By allowing the bed to collapse in a purposely uncontrolled “design” process, and by foresting an interior landscape, Plottegg was abjuring design and signature, as well as Modernism’s formalist mantras of point, line and plane and its ur-subjects, space, form and materials. Collapsing the bed changed the subject from form and function to concept, and from abstraction to narrative: the bed acquired content and story. Already in 1972, he was falling into the Duchampian camp that offered a critique of Modernism that differed from Robert Venturi’s critique, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, first published in 1966, which emphasized language, sign and meaning. Their respective complexities differed. There was, at the time, a larger international context for the collapse of Plottegg’s bed. In the 1960s, artists were cultivating destruction. Gordon Matta Clark is perhaps the most famous of the artist/architects to take apart a found object: trained as an architect but practicing as a sculptor in what Rosalind Krauss called “the expanded field,” he specialized in destroying buildings with surgical cuts, and then photo­graph­ ing the results. In the late 1960s, the New York artist, Barry Le Va, dropped planes of glass from various heights in installations where the shattered planes resting on the floor were the art piece.

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More locally, the Viennese architect Hans Hollein designed a series of small shops in Vienna (and New York) that galvanized the field, with tightly focused storefronts and interiors that were jewel-like in their precision, detail and unexpected strangeness. These micro-projects proved that small projects could dislocate the field and have an impact disproportionate to their size. It is a peculiarity of Plottegg’s career and personality that he dared look in places and building types that no one else had bothered exploring. Over several years, Plottegg remodeled a series of common bathrooms that he transformed into provocative theses, despite the rather tight quarters and unexpected venues. That they were bathrooms, with toilets, was part of the rub, part of the frictive environment of Duchampian thought. In the first, done in 1982, Plottegg tiled a bathroom in black and white stripes angling in different directions, setting up a conflict of directions and vectors: the room zigged this way, then that, then in another direction. The washbasin was set up in a corner, off the orthogonal, and an angled, leaning, segmented glass wall adjacent to the tub further contributed to a spatial conflict that verged on unintelligibility. The optics denied any vanishing point in this otherwise long, orthogonal room, and basically brought the background forward. Still, the bathroom functioned, even after losing spatial coherence: it was no less efficient or sanitary, but the optical manipulation of the zebra patterns ushered it into the world of ideas. In his next bathroom, For K. Schwitters, Plottegg brought spatial confusion to a frenzy by angling mirrors, some shaped in forced perspective, which in their totality created a fun-house effect of compounded illusions. Whereas Schwitters fragmented the object, Plottegg fragmented space, which was no longer a whole. “Here no form follows function,” he says. “By removing the right angles and destroying the parallelism of the walls, you can no longer make out the shape and size of the room.” It was his first Deconstructivist work. A year later, in 1984, he took the fringe that normally sways like a hoola skirt in a car wash and adapted it to the top of a helmet so that a motorcyclist wearing it resembled a Roman centurion. He then took it to the rear window of a car, and then to a bathroom where one fringe hid the toilette and others closed the door: a different kind of body was being washed in a different context. The meaning of the fringes migrated, depending on context. He would later elaborate on this idea of changing meaning and function when, on screen, building parts floated in his computer as they took on different roles, depending on their scale, position and context. The rule, or algorithm, was to take something with a specific use in one context and transpose it to another. Algorithms were simply rules that worked in the analog as well as the digital worlds. The idea of transposing contexts became a poster image many years later when he tapped into the issue of extreme sports by photo shopping himself ironing his own pant leg in the context of a steep Alpine cliff.

These small speculations, done in the privacy of domestic bathrooms, would see a more public expression when Plottegg realized an installation for the Austrian Railroad in 1983 to redesign the long, narrow interior of a rail car. Deploying mirrors at angles and setting them among angled walls, Plottegg broke the dominating linearity with angled views that scrambled the space and virtually widened the car, now transformed into a Kurt Schwitters environment on wheels. In a concrete exercise in the phenomenology of perception, he reshaped the normally long, narrow space. In the bathrooms and then the railroad car Plottegg deployed simple design moves to create a non-linear, multi-directional space that did not add up to the Renaissance wholes created in the perspectival world of his architectural ancestors. These three bathrooms broke the normal conventional understanding of orthogonal space and ushered space into a relativity of parts in shifting relationships. Destabilizing the space, setting it into relational movement as the user walked through space, amounted to a disruption of architecture’s foundational presumption of framed, static space. In these small self-initiated projects for himself and friends and then for Austrian Rail, Plottegg challenged not only the wholeness of Renaissance space but also the permanence of structure, spatial integrity and even meaning. Unlike most Modernists, he was not boiling meaning down to a single and immutable thing: he was not a Platonist of space, not an essentialist. He multiplied possibilities beyond essences. Back in 1983, he already set spaces off into a new building block of uncertainty, long before Deconstructivism had become a word. Many architectural commissions start with an existing building that must be renovated or otherwise transformed. Plottegg has worked on many commissions that involve existing structures, but rather than simply treating the brief narrowly, he often conceives of the building as an objet trouvé, to be transformed with a concept and not simply to be “improved.” Duchamp worked with urinals; Plottegg worked with bathrooms; in larger projects, his conceptual interventions transform the building, changing the subject from function alone to function wrapped in a concept wrapped in a joke. Form and beauty are not the issue. He elevates the commission to another level. In 1988 Plottegg, in collaboration with Andreas Gruber, was given the commission to renovate and revitalize Trautenfels, an imposing baroque palace set on a base of ramparts in the district of Liezen in Styria, a state in southeast Austria. The castle had belonged to the Styrian Youth Hostel Association and was being converted into a museum. The masonry structure, as a given, was a massive, immoveable object, with vaulted interiors and notable Renaissance and Baroque frescoes painted in some of its grand chambers. Plottegg’s strategy was punctual, to create interventions at strategic points, as though “treating” the heavy building by acupuncture. In the context of the heavily restored interior, the sum total of all his interventions was to give the imposing

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castle a new spirit of levity and to re-contextualize the building through his interventions. He was finding new urinals to sign. In the main entry hall, with massive arches and vaults springing from thick pillars, Plottegg immediately set his agenda with a reception desk that destabilized the space with illusion. Projecting the diagonal form of a propeller from crossing vault lines of the ceilings above, he constructed a soffit that he turned and duplicated below at the reception desk, all of it veiled by planes of sliding glass set at an angle that faintly mirror the surrounding space. The scissoring angels of the desk and soffit above are, in combination, difficult to grasp, unintelligible at a glance but mesmerizing. They set a new, lighter, transformative tone and disruptive agenda for the whole castle as one enters: the design does not deliver the shock of a Surrealist, out-of-place image but the less confrontational approach of an anecdotal environment of individual moments that do not add up to a totalizing look or concept. Downstairs, Plottegg, the master of bathrooms, set urinals directly against the rough bedrock walls of the underground rooms, the jagged rock contrasting with the smooth forms of the white porcelain fixtures. A floor-to-ceiling mirror set at an angle adds an element of spatial confusion by reflecting the ceiling and upending the space. A half-dozen rolls of toilet paper are arrayed on the wall of the toilet chamber, all out of reach from the toilet. Sliding glass doors with jagged edges were designed to part and then come back together in a perfect fit. Likewise the wavy edges of the sliding glass exit doors pocket into each other’s curves perfectly when closed: apart, they look untamed. The two doors are bracketed by two truncated flights of stairs that dead-end in a low-flying ceiling vault, staircases to nowhere. Symmetrical and well behaved, if absurd, they are a comment on the dubious logic of symmetry so often blindly applied. But perhaps the most disruptive and character-changing intervention is at the entrance, where instead of hinging the pair of doors on the sides of the door frame, Plottegg hinged the doors at the floor. In this case, however, each door is half a staircase, and when the two pivot up into position, their steps mesh forming a solid double “French” door. Plottegg changed the rule, or algorithm, of the door: the swivel axes are horizontal instead of vertical, and the doors form stereometric bodies instead of flat door leaves. Plottegg documented it all with cameras fixed according to another change of rules: he attached cameras to movable components. Instead of a camera held by a photographer by hand or on a tripod, he taped cameras to the parts of the building that move or swing, such as the entrance door, the edge of the toilet seat, the handle of the door, and the elevators. The point of view by which the building is “seen” was completely displaced from the user, breaking the hold of perspectival expectation on the eye in favor of unexpected viewpoints that challenged and changed the understanding and experience of the space.

Not only did Plottegg conceive buildings differently. He perceived them differently. He was dislocating architecture’s foundational principles, the perspectival point of view, with the cone of vision emanating from the viewer. But he went about it “mildly, lightly, unimportantly,” as Duchamp once said of his attitude about making art. All these interventions added up to a transformative commentary that lightened the character of a prepossessing, rather self-serious building with a heavy history. The building acquired a new energy. But besides their quizzical and quietly humorous character, the interventions undercut the agenda of stability and the aura of authority of a governmental structure. Plottegg’s interventions destabilize space, form and symmetry. The desk, sited between the scissoring forms of the propeller above and below, question space caught in a moment of sheer, an effect enhanced by the filmy veils of glass. The mirror in the bathroom upends the otherwise ordered space in the room. The double French doors at the entrance pivot on a diagonal through the classically decorated and vaulted arcade, and challenge the surrounding static orthogonal order not only by their geometry but by the very fact that they move in an unexpected way. He loosened the hold of geometric authority on a building so that it was no longer controlling. His techniques of destabilization released the totalizing effects of architecture. For Plottegg, the solution was hyper-function: the new stair/doorway into the castle blurs functions in a hybridization that compresses the functions into a surprise. Plottegg had theorized hybrid architecture in a series of studies in which he did perhaps the first morphing in architecture, in which he fused one image with another to create a third. Although morphing became a popular and even common digital technique by the 1990s, Plottegg developed the idea through manual systems at first in 1981, and then digitally. Plottegg advised anyone to consider any plan or any object, that is, any ready-made, as a candidate for a morphing operation. Whatever the input, the data could be radically transformed through its interaction with other data. At first he hybridized his ready-mades manually, taking, for example, radial distances from a central point in a house and a cow to map an average distance in a fused, or morphed, object. Whether using Cartesian or polar coordinates did not matter because the rule or algorithm could be arbitrary if it was systematically applied. What mattered was that the unpredictability of the result, which was released from authorial control. For Plottegg the iteration with the maximum deviation was the new design. He soon hybridized ready-mades on the computer screen because, he said, “the manual techniques were too boring and time-consuming, so I turned to the computer.” Hybrid­ i­zing via a digital algorithm was swift and elegant. The computer generated hybrids resulting from the data input of analog drawings such as Corbusier’s Modulor and a Thonet chair, or the floor plan of an apartment and the map of Austria.

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Plottegg’s turn to the computer was early and decisive. He was fusing the disruptive power of asymmetrical conceptual thinking to the disruptive capacity of new technology. He was one of the few of his generation to embrace the computer holistically, not just as a drafting tool. Early on, starting in the 1980s, he theorized how screen space and computational logic affected how architecture could be actually conceived rather than just drawn. Most architects using the computer predicated its use as a drafting table and parallel rule, as though they were still manipulating instruments by hand. Conventional software was designed to “paint” realistic representations, complete with shadows, light sources and surface reflections. He understood that software was overlooking the potential of the computer itself, and that the computer had a logic and capacity beyond its ability to draft and represent. Plottegg reasoned that if the science of perspective once revolutionized architecture, the logic of the computer dislocated the perspectival understanding of space within a revolution of its own. “With computers, we don’t have rules—contrary to hand-drawn drawings, the computer has no scale or meaning and lines don’t have functions.” So-called solid geometry cedes to fractal geometry and to the fluidities of screen space. Data in a computer can generate a picture or numerical lists or binary lists; they can even be translated into music. Pixels transcend disciplines. Forms depicted on screen are understood by the computer as bits, and so become detached from the content of the representation information. A house and a cow lose their “content” in a computer that sees no problem conflating cow and house because it does not distinguish apples from oranges. A new hybrid form owes nothing to figurative identity. The computer liberated the architect from conceiving and assembling a building by analogue, detaching the image from the referent. Data are not analog. Plottegg was maintaining that the data on screen are neither an architectural drawing nor a model, but detached from the “reality” usually depicted in a re­presentation. The shift from analog to digital procedure dislocates 2000 years of Vitruvius. “If you use the computer as it wants to be used, computers don’t have taste, and they can’t make historical comparisons,” he said. Plottegg’s use of the computer amounted to a declaration of independence and of resistance to established theory and practice. In 1988, Plottegg, in association with Christoph Zechner, conceived the Binary House for a competition called The most beautiful house in the world. He deconstructed two 3D data sets, a house and a kindergarten, by morphing and mixing them with other data sets, so that bits and pieces exploded on screen into a constellation of parts without a site, plan or point of view: the parts no longer constituted a whole. Perspective 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

obsolesced static models of architectural production, emancipating design from function. The environment on screen was completely open to interpretation—or, as Plottegg said, “autocatalytic and algorithmic, quick and dirty.” By the time of the Binary House, literary deconstructionists had already theorized that the relationship between words and meaning was loose if not indeter­ minate, and Plottegg was postulating the same between images on screen and their referents: his computer detached them, separating the signifier from the signified. The conventions of architectural drawing no longer obtained, establishing the syntax that fixed parts in a relational meaning. Liberated from representation, the parts floated like free radicals, free to bond. Two closely spaced parallel lines may not indicate a wall, for example. Grids and patterns, similarly, have no set meaning. The lines or planes 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 in any combination. Lines are nameless, and therefore devoid of architectural function,” he said. If some architects were taking the fundamentalist position that architecture is, and should be, based on established typologies, and that the parts of a building—its windows, doors, lintels—also play known roles in fixed hierarchies of parts, Plottegg was instead taking it all apart, freeing the parts into orders emergent on screen. The shards, lines, triangles, wedges and other forms of his Binary House reconfiguring themselves in a directionless, anti-gravitational environment suggested endless configurations in endless variations of houses. The parts are released into an indeterminate state without preconception and predetermination. Conventions of architec­tural drawing or even “language” no longer govern the screen. Many interpretations of the data are possible, none correct or incorrect. “We are in the field of a new relation­ship of form and information,” in an interpretative environment without a single, fixed point of view. The screen delivers the pivoting cameras in the Trautenfels Castle to the architect at his desk. In the dynamic environment of the computer, with on-screen zooming and shifting, “South and hell are no longer down below,” he says: the process eliminates direction and boundaries. Converging lines, for example, no longer signal three-dimensional depth; they might be the edges of a flat plane. The accidental forms of the Binary House result from the shift in paradigm from analog design to interpretative interaction, from pictures to what Plottegg calls “blottings” that are suggestive rather than deter­ ministic. The architect need only ascribe dimension to the drawing. Designating a line one or five meters long starts an interpretation of all the other lines and shapes. When he commands the computer to sort elements out by dimension, material or even price, or presses commands like shift, cancel, stretch, deform—“hacking around,” says Plottegg—he is using the computer as he had mirrors and illusionistic graphics to deform real spaces. He launches the screen and space into a liberating instability. Destabilizing the canvas breaks the architect’s usual control over design, not

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to mention the relevance of fundamentalist typologies and conventions, making the process unexpected, disjunctive, and unpredictable. This interactivity produces what Plottegg calls “a cornucopia whose main feature is complexity.” Plottegg challenged the omniscience of the human eye in his work on Trautenfels Castle, and similarly, his use of the computer removes the “aesthetic eye” of a designer and allows a greater level of complexity in what becomes an on-screen system of probabilities. The designer still has the power of manipulation by varying the probabilities, but in an open system, the element of chance still plays a dominant role in determining the form of the outcome. [ From The Double Arrow, Architecture of Becoming, architectural flier, 1992 ] Plottegg’s counterintuitive goal, he says, is “to get the computer to design the project for me.” From his early investigations, as in the Collapsed Bed, Plottegg’s modus operandi was to open closed systems, whether systems of thought or building systems. He avoided design determinism with a variety of techniques that he invented or developed, in­cluding morphing, estrangement, deviation, inversions, irony, swerve, optics, visual deconstruction, virtuality, dislocation, algorithmic inversions. But the computer brought his investigations and speculations into open systems to a whole new level of potential. In one of many exhibition installations, Hyper-Hybrid Architecture Generator, of 2008, at the Vienna University of Technology, he devised a new sort of camera obscura, or camera illuminata, in which a viewer standing in front of a screen displaying a field of constructive elements (similar to the floating field of unnamed parts of the Binary House) projected the viewer as an avatar into screen space, or into virtuality, where the viewer via the avatar could experience the environment and act on, and within, its elements, which formed an inchoate but navigable environment. It was a brilliant realization of the moment in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, when the protagonist stepped into the screen in front of him, into cyberspace. Plottegg however did it outside the realm of fiction in a real-life exhibition at the Biennal de Arte Contemporáneo de Sevilla that hypothesized the fungibility of real and virtual space. The installation summarized in a single show the efforts that Plottegg had been making since the time of his bathroom installations, at eliding real and virtual spaces. The computer, however, upped the ante: it emphasized the notion of cybervirtuality, and he had been making efforts at merging the spaces in a continuity, lifting virtual space off screen into real space and projecting the viewer from real space into virtuality. It was possible to cultivate and occupy the blur. He had left the perspectival world of analogs far behind. Hyper-Hybrid Architecture Generator was the culmination of a long series of installations in electronic media, starting in 1969, when Plottegg submitted a competition entry for Architecture and Freedom, in association with Hartmut Skerbisch, in the Graz Kunsthaus. Opening the definition of the environment to include transmissions

by electronic media, even from far away, as well as “things hugging the skin,” Plottegg set up a multi-media environment that included two TV cameras and two TV picture tubes, loudspeakers for broadcasts, a slide projector and fine-meshed screen, plus two glass panes, one reflective and the other transparent. There were physical things, like the mirror, and then transmissions from the outside; the installation mixed real space elements with virtualities coming in. The text on the mirror spellt James Joyce’s cryptic, verbally Cubist phrase, “Put allspace in a notshell.” Plottegg had created a mediated environment, with images and sounds projected and televised from near and far that was no less physical for being electronic. Images unrelated and unhinged from the immediate environment were nested within it, related to each other in a web of facts that constituted an informational environ­ment. The mirror and glass panes were optically ambiguous enough to doubt space. Like Joyce, fitting the universal (“allspace”) in a nutshell, Plottegg encapsulated an image of a group of people sitting on a saturnine wheel under a cosmic cloud 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 perhaps universalized the miniature, conflating micro- and macro-environments within an electronic parable into which visitors could venture. Virtuality for Plottegg is real— conceivable and buildable. The installation referred obliquely to black holes, Einstein, Henri Bergson’s theories of time and duration, and Marshall McLuhan’s riffs on media. The preciously conceived installation, now historic, was re-installed in a very elegant update in the Kunsthaus in 2012. It had been a prescient marker in contemporary archi­tectural history. Plottegg continued exploring the continuity between “reality” and virtuality in subsequent installations. “Virtuality is real,” he says. “It’s concrete. Sometimes reality is virtual.” For Plottegg the two are conflated. In 2002, Plottegg explored the Hyper-Hybrid idea in a greatly expanded installation, The Web of Life, at a very appropriate venue for the subject, the prestigious Karlsruhe Center for Art and Media, itself conceived as a latter-day Bauhaus to absorb the new virtual machine and its digital world in a post-mechanical, post-modernist culture. Plottegg conditioned the environment by doubting its physics, creating spatially indeterminate, curving, invaginated spaces without apparent end. The amorphous form of the installation, completely covered with a fitted carpet, deprived the visitor of visual orientation. The undulating walls in the darkened and disorienting environment served as screens for the projection of digitally produced images, akin to the abstractions of the Binary House, a floating environment of lines and planes and clouds in which visitors, some of them filmed and projected on screen, wandered like avatars in their own reality. Scans of the inner space were beamed onto the outer skin with the fitted carpet. The projections represented multiple manifestations of the web, some in 3D (to be seen with 3D glasses). 018 019

Within the installation, black cables could not be seen in the darkened environment, and while visitors navigated the environment of cables projected on undulating walls, they bumped into the real cables they could not see, in a case-study, real-life reversal of the definition of real and virtual. In another part of the installation, Plottegg erected a tensegrity structure of metal cables and compression struts supporting within its elegant web two-sided screens and cameras projecting images of the same environment in a mise-en-abîme of virtualities nested in realities nested in virtualities. The installation is based on real-time human perception of space and the discourses on the shift from Euclidean geometry to the not-quite graspable and locatable virtuality of cyberspace. Orientation is indefinite, and shapes are irrelevant, the distinctions between outside and inside misleading. Projected images weaken the corporeal presence of the surfaces on which they are shown. Information floats, detached from the objects that carry it. Visitors walked into a built and projected parable of virtuality and physicality blurred. “I’m not a designer,” says Plottegg. “I just change rules.” For Plottegg, a basic problem in architecture involves architects with a “signature,” the so-called “handwriting” of the office, which the architect applies across commissions, whether for a church, office building or house. Plottegg’s one self-interdiction is what he calls self-similarity, the repetition of a signature across projects and building types. In addition, he criticizes the self-similar results of white-cube modern architecture, which follows certain rules, as does Otto Wagner’s Neo-Classicism, or even Czech Cubism. He credits Deconstructivism with deconstructing the rules of architecture, citing his compatriot Wolf Prix of Coop Himmelb(l)au, for example, for making structural members thin in compression and thick in tension, rather than the reverse: Prix inverts the normal rule, generating a non-normative architecture. “Deconstructivists deconstruct the rules of architecture,” Plottegg says. He notes that inversions are just one technique, and in any case, the techniques differ between analog and digital processes. Rules can be changed more easily in a computer, with immediate consequences. In his own practice, if one of Plottegg’s drawings looks like a Lissitzky, he discards the drawing because, however flattering and erudite, he believes the result can, and should, be new: “If you are still applying the old rules, you cannot be creative and do something new,” he says. “You don’t even have to think about it: you just change the algorithm, whether it’s analog or digital.” Changing the rule is independent of the input. At Trautenfels Castle, he changed the rule for a door from being a flat plane to a stereometric form, and changed its axis of rotation from vertical to horizontal. Changing the rules can trigger unexpected results and a self-catalytic process because they are not controlled by the omniscience of an architect. Changing the algorithm in the computer, however, replaces an anthropocentric process with an external, automated

process that does not carry an individual signature, and it also unplugs architecture from traditions and meanings carried over in memories embedded in traditions that involve the hand and perspectival eye. “The hard drive obsolesces the linear, singular and visual logic of orthogonal projects,” he says. Plottegg notes that changing the rules in the computer is more easily done than “in your brain or behavior.” In the computer the variations and sheer quantity are greater than in analog design. Like a theoreticial physicist, Plottegg has conducted experiments throughout his career with his installations and exhibitions. Sometimes he just produced specula­tions, such as proposing in a sketch that pencil lead buried in an eraser would produce a scribble when used to erase: the simple mechanical substitution replaced linear thinking with non-linear accidentalism. But in the architecture office in Graz, which he has maintained over the decades, he has applied his own discoveries like an applied physicist to the design of real buildings. The application of his theories is perhaps more obvious when he renovates a ready-made—a “found” building—with an installation that transforms its nature, such as the installations he designed for Trautenfels Castle. But Plottegg has also applied theory in many ground-up projects, including the usually no-nonsense commissions for designing public housing, with their strict rules and strict budgets. For a competition for an urn cemetery in Graz in 1985, and for another in Linz in 1999, Plottegg used the random function of the computer to distribute pixels, or graves, on the site, simulating the free selection of locations according to participatory processes. Instead of predetermining the layout of the cemetery with axes or a grid, and building the whole infrastructure before the placement of the urns, Plottegg reasoned that it was actually more practical to open the plot, and the system, to free choice, so that the first urn is placed here, the second over there, in a simulation of randomness that would eventually accommodate 5,000 urns. With each urn represented by a pixel, the pixels form a web that generates walkways and infrastructure. As the numbers increase, the random locations coalesce into a field of dots that self-organize into a self-determining network in an emergent landscape. In a process that resembles the build-up of lines in a drip painting by Jackson Pollock, the cemetery gradually fills in, obeying a subliminal order that is non-linear and non-Euclidean, but rational per the ratiocination of a digital process based in the pixilation of the screen and field. Plottegg’s system is ordered within its apparent disorder. Also in 1985, for a competition for the RESOWI Center at the University of Graz, Plottegg and his collaborator Martin Zechner studied the space allocations of the institute by scripting the computer and changing the parameters, producing a random distribution of spaces in the 500-room building, resulting in lines that look like tracings of dice thrown in a game. Scripting at this time was a little-known technique rarely applied in architecture, and Plottegg’s tactics of random proportions, random distribution and random spatial rotations, generating geometric and functional

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progres­sions, produced an overall fractal complexity. The wire-frame renderings of the submission panels show the project with x-ray transparency, unusual for the time; its multi-perspectival array of images graphically conveys the underlying spatial complexity of the project. RESOWI was historically precocious, an early and important work of Deconstructivism avant la lettre that used a digital logic to arrive at anti-formalist con­ clusions similar to those proposed by Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman and Plottegg’s Austrian compatriots Coop Himmelb(l)au, but by different logics. Plottegg arrived at the position early. For an architect who eschewed the very idea of the architect’s omniscient control over a project, the computer offered the perfect aleatory escape from the notion of design as it descended from the Renaissance. It challenged signature; it even challenged the planimetric prejudice of paper. Concerning the Seiersberg Housing Development project of 1987, a built social housing project done in collaboration with Christoph Zechner and Fritz Mascher, Plottegg said, “My goal was to get the computer to design the project for me.” He notes that Mozart made compositions with dice, and therefore randomness. Plottegg developed the design on the screen interactively, using commands such as “insert,” “shift,” “stretch,” “setvar,” “double,” “dynamo,” “donut,” and “cancel” to morph multi-colored and structural pixel arrangements into the by-now familiar randomized field of abstract elements that he first generated for the Binary House: Plottegg “reads” the random lines and what he calls “blottings” to interpolate the site plan, floor plan, section and elevation from a drawing that conflates all spatial dimensions on screen (a technique distantly related to his Collapsed Bed when everything came together in the fall). The design for the housing is latent in the computer-generated drawing, and he teases and “lifts” the plan out of the graphic field by assigning scale and definitions to the parts, by “looking for what I need.” He finds the necessary elements in a drawing that acts as a chest of parts. If the built result looks crisp and clean, like an artifact of industrial Modernism, it is because one of the parameters factored into the computer and the design process is the list of rules required for standardized housing by the client, a state bureaucracy. He achieves a near zero degree of design, if “design” is intended to mean “signature.” But the repetitive and cellular nature of the units forming housing blocks is not a conceptual problem for Plottegg, since in this and subsequent housing projects he treats the blocks as a readymade that he recontextualizes with interventions so subtle that they escape the vigilant eye of the bureaucracy. The façade of balconies carries metal struts, apparently structural but without clear function, some configured in a truss that echoes a classical cornice line. A stairway to a second floor is detached from the building, free-standing, leading to nowhere.

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 loftlike spaces into a conventional layout of living room and bedroom. The doors create a participatory environment that allows the occupant to determine the interior configuration. 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 apartments 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 pursuit 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 twoway transreality between the physical and virtual. He created environmental installations 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.

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Works

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Bit String Frozen image of a bit string generated by a script, 1994 “… we are in an environment of zeros and ones.” 026 027

One Pixel Drawing, 210 × 297 mm, 1994 Hand drawing, black felt pen on paper (original 1985, red felt pen)

trigon 69 201231 Our configuration is aimed at establishing connections to the web of ascertainable facts. For us, environment is the instantaneous access point, the present field of experience. Occurrences brought closer by the senses and all visions. Things hugging the skin, and trans­­missions by electronic media from far away. Facets of total space individually picked up and put together. The user should be able to realize that he can experience the environment in a more comprehensive manner thanks to the artificial environment of the configuration. 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 028 029



trigon 69 201231

spatial configuration Constituted by establishing relations based on: 2 tv cameras as a remote site 2 tv picture tubes loudspeakers with orf broadcasts two glass panes letters a slide projection consumption of electric energy Two glass panes—one reflecting, the other transparent—are 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 Plan, competition entry, 1969 In collaboration with Hartmut Skerbisch † Spatial configuration, Architecture & Freedom, trigon ’69, Graz

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 demons­ tration 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

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 corre­sponds 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

Original stamp for members of the Lord Jim Lodge 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; generated lines stemming from a data crash dump when transferring data from DOS to Mac

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 038 039

3D objects

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 040 041

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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.

Hyper-Hybrid Architecture Generator Exhibition, 2008 Curator: Peter Weibel 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.

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. 046 047

Spielberg Housing Development Generated design, 1991 Functional layout, general site plan

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. 050 051

Line Seeking Concrete Prints (stylus printer), 1989 Periferie, exhibition, Graz, Haus der Architektur 052 053

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. 054 055



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 056 057

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). 058 059

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.)

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. 062 063

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 Student work for furniture construction course at Graz, University of Technology The torn-out legs of the chair are structurally replaced by the user’s legs, which results in a dynamic seating position. 064 065

Rocker Edition Edition Artelier, 2009 Graz, Artelier Contemporary

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. 066 067

Presentation of the winning project

The chair as a spatial element

Vorläufer … precurseur … forerunner Rendering, 2010 Concept for an exhibition installation on Cologne Orgatec Boulevard 068 069

Biedermeier tabernacle chest

070 071

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.

on the process of collapsing Collapsing is not a reflective process, but a direct manipulation of objects. Definition is not a priori effected by language (title, associations of words, desires, etc.), is not tied to semantic forms derived from graphic representations, is not determined by methods which renounce nameless sophistication through premature expression.

Without trying to exert control in whatever which way, the process and the still cryptic (detailed) shape of the output are accepted. The crash (at the moment of the collapse) shall be the symbol of authority and inexorability of a physical process, the simultaneity 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. 072 073

Tube turned in, tieback. During inflation, the outer skin is stretched, the inner compressed. Each body imported into the inner skin is tightly enclosed.

The (turned-in) inner part acts as a tieback of minimum length. Its shortening during the bending process is turned out. Thus, the balance of forces is 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. 074 075

Inflatable Structures Installation, 1968 Student work for furniture course at Graz, University of Technology 076 077

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. 078 079

video still.prn Prints, 1997 Computer printouts … transferred from Photoshop … transferred from video

Pneumatic Installation, 1998 In collaboration with Peter Kogler Nice, Galerie Soardi ø 60 cm polyethylene tube turned in, printing pattern by Kogler, pattern repeat: 30 cm 082 083

Pneumatic Installation, 2000 In collaboration with Peter Kogler Bregenz, Kunsthaus ø 60 cm polyethylene tube turned in, printing pattern by Kogler, pattern repeat: 30 cm

Pneumatic Installation, 1999 In collaboration with Peter Kogler Salzburg, Rupertinum ø 100 cm polyethylene tube turned in, printing pattern by Kogler: hose, silver-grey 084 085

Art Lounge Interior Conversion, 2002 Café Korb, Vienna, Brandstätte With contributions by Günter Brus, Peter Kogler, Manfred Plottegg, and Peter Weibel 086 087

Art Lounge Redesign, 2007 Café Korb, Vienna, Brandstätte Design for a face-lifting of the art lounge (not realized)

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)

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

Fringe Bathroom Interior Conversion, 1984 Graz, Brunngasse Carwash brushes and artificial turf

Fringe Bathroom Interior Conversion, 1984 Graz, Brunngasse 094 095

Fringe Car Design/Object, 1989 Fringes as a spoiler extension for stall prevention of air flow at less than 123.5 kph 096 097

Fringe Helmet (Mohawk) Design/Object, 1989 Helmet prototype for a Roman centurion, Emperor Francis Joseph, or the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club (HAMC)

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 098 099

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

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 102 103

Bathrooms with Stripes Interior Conversion, 1982—1983 1982 Graz, Schillerstrasse 1982 Wien, Am Hof 1983 Graz, Liebiggasse 104 105

Bathroom “for K. Schwitters” Interior Conversion, 1983 Graz, Liebiggasse

Bathroom with Laundry Interior Conversion, 1996 Graz, Brandhofgasse The suspended grid goes up and down (down-position: hang up laundry, up-position: dry laundry). 108 109

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. 110 111

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

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

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. 118 119

Cathedral of Intelligence “Proper drawing,” 2006 Sun Bosom Hammer Renderings stemming from a 1991 data animation (stills) 120 121

Cathedral of Intelligence Model, 2011 Sun Bosom Hammer 3D printout (1991 data) 122 123

Mr Faust Playing Roulette Model, 1986 In collaboration with Martin Zechner Proposal for a stage design for a play by Wolfgang Bauer

124 125

Tower Staircase Revitalization, 1989 Trautenfels Castle Supporting reinforced concrete and suspended steel structure 126 127

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

128 129

130 131

Ladies’ and Men’s Interior conversion, 1992 Trautenfels Castle Standard metal sheet-pile profiles as partition walls, seven different toilet paper rolls for more comfort

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

134 135

Doors Revitalization, 1992 Trautenfels Castle Automatic sliding doors: Eternit lavatory door, wavy glass porch / exit door 136 137

Steps or Door Revitalization, 1992 Trautenfels Castle Prismatic cantilevered steps for new stairwell; the same pre-fab components were used for a safety door.

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). 140 141

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.”

Seiersberg Housing Development Project development, 1987 In collaboration with Christoph Zechner and Fritz Mascher Computer-generated (Photoshop) design for 160 housing units 142 143

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. The design exists simultaneously in various virtual pictures. The data printout in form of a picture is an indication of the spatial model. The printout is, according to the respectively alleged scale, a flat draft and a spatial fragment at the same time. 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.

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?” 144 145

Seiersberg Housing Development New construction, 1991 Seiersberg, Styria, first construction stage: 40 subsidized housing units Curtain wall façade, continuous balconies as extended living rooms 146 147

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!

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 150 151

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. 152 153

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 154 155

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. 156 157

Hybrid architecture Computer design, 1981 Morphing program (In-house programming) Modulor & Thonet chair / Scheiße & Genuß (shit & pleasure) / “Austrian House” 158 159

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 160 161

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.

Metamorphosis of a Town Flat Installation/Photomontage/Drawing, 1972 Student work at Graz, University of Technology

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 gushes forth, taking its course according to the given circumstances. (Years of carelessness springing from indifference will eventually yield the same results.) 162 163

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 164 165

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

Leoben Housing Development New construction, 1992 Leoben, Sackgasse, eight subsidized housing units Architecture following building regulations, open central circulation 168 169

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.

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 172 173

Random distribution of cubed spaces, four limit pictures: orthogonal, rotated, broken-up rectangles, overlapping forms

174 175

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 176 177

How to use it: shake the prism 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 (thermomechanically deformed overhead transparencies), one polyline (thread), signature, and date. Exhibited in Jenseits von Kunst (Beyond Art) in Graz, Budapest, and Antwerp. 178 179

Firefighters Museum Revitalization, conversion, 1995 Groß Sankt Florian 3D door with integrated aerial ladder (changed door algorithms) 180 181

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 182 183

Bathhouse New construction, 1993 Graz, Burgfriedweg No view from inside to outside, whereas everything inside can be seen from outside. 184 185

Place a User’s Manual Exhibition design for Jeffrey Shaw, 1995 Graz, Künstlerhaus Non-contact lightlocks 186 187

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 188 189

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 190 191

Inclusion : Exclusion Exhibition design, 1996 Curator: Peter Weibel Graz, Reininghaus Billboards in the street and in the exhibition hall 192 193

“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 194 195

Phantom of Desire Exhibition design, 2003 Curator: Peter Weibel

Graz, Neue Galerie Aluminum pendulum supports with wavy 3D mirror sheet metal as image carriers and floor covering

Orcus Exhibition design for Gerhard Roth, 2004

Vienna, Literaturhaus Wavy sheet metal, powder-coated 196 197

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 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 Tilted prisms (trapezoidal sheet metal and coated panels) 200 201

Urban E Installation, 1999 Design studio exhibition at Vienna, University of Technology Students’ works developed in the context of Plottegg’s visiting professorship 202 203

Archdiploma 2007 Exhibition design, 2007 In collaboration with Harald Trapp Vienna, project space Karlsplatz Exhibition of the Faculty for Architecture at Vienna’s University of Technology

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 204 205

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. 206 207

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 208 209

Eybesfeld Castle Housing Project New construction, 2003 Jöss, Styria Open ground plans with flexible cabinets/boxes as room dividers 210 211

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 212 213

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. 216 217

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 218 219

220 221

Housing Development “Society and Ecology” International pilot competition, 2007; realization, 2013 Gleisdorf Sixty-one housing units, bank, social service facilities 222 223

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. 224 225

Exterior steel construction supplementing the room program

Literaturhaus Competition, 2000 Graz

Vivarium Competition, 1998, 2002 Neumarkt/Mariahof A water world as a tourist attraction 228 229

Amazonas

Wellness

Piranha-Pool

Lobby

Restaurant

Sauna

Wellness

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

Kunsthaus Competition, 2000 Graz 230 231

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.

Mirror Toilet Prototype, 1979 Vienna Prototype for (Freudian) psychoanalyst Prof. M. H. 234 235

Toilet Swing Object, 1999 Graz 236 237

Toilet Shower Prototype, 2012 Graz Prototype for a gush shower

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. 238 239

Fair Hall Competition, 1983 Graz 240 241

Wood in Housing Construction Competition, 1984 In collaboration with Christoph Zechner Styria Airbrush-rendering 242 243

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

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

Design Studio Exhibition 2010 Exhibition design, 2010 In collaboration with Harald Trapp Department for Architecture, Design & Planning Methodology, Vienna, University of Technology 248 249

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. 250 251

Spot the Difference Poster, 2007 The picture of Plottegg himself on the right shows five changes compared with the one on the left. 252 253

“The Architect as a Seismograph” Statement ad Hans Hollein, Architecture Biennale Venice, 1996 Kupelwieser verifies the seismograph theory. Plottegg asserts: architecture is not a seismograph.

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 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 subversive gestaltpsychological dimension lies in …

Generativní Architektury Poster, 2009 Solo show at the Austrian Cultural Forum in Prague 256 257

Siteless Poster, 1996 Lecture Plottegg/Weibel, University of Innsbruck

The Binary House Poster, 1990

Solo show at Munic, Architekturgalerie Silk-screen prints with changing colors 258 259

Startup Models Poster, 1995 Exhibition at Architekturgalerie München Exhibition of student projects in the context of the CAAD professorship at Munich University of Technology, 1994/95 260 261

Fresh Bits & Pixels Every Day Poster, 1987 Exhibition at Forum Stadtpark, Graz

Browse Architecture Poster, 1995 Design by Ali Kada Announcement of a summer workshop at Graz, Haus der Architektur Workshop in collaboration with Marcos Novak and Colin Fournier (cancelled) 262 263

The Solution of the Doric Corner Conflict in the Graz School of Architecture Poster, 1992 Design by Ali Kada Lecture, Circolo Trentino Per L’Architettura Contemporanea, Trento

Architecture as Seen by the Components Poster, 2012 Lecture at Media Lab, Vienna, University of Technology 264 265

Hybrid Architecture: Plottegg Ironing Against the Separation of Functions Poster, 2003 Announcement of course at Vienna, University of Technology Installation in front of the Institute for Architecture and Design

Autocatalytic Architecture Poster, 1997 Double act Plottegg/Weibel; London, UCL, Bartlett School of Architecture 266 267

Plottegg’s Plots Poster, 2000 Solo exhibition at Graz, Neue Galerie

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. 268 269

270 271

Appendix

272

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

282

Thanks to

282 Copyrights 283

Publisher’s Note

List of Works 3D Door, Door Steps Steps Door, revitalization, 1992, Trautenfels Castle, Styria • 141 3D Door, Eybesfeld Castle, project, 1997, Jöss, Styria 3D Door, Herberstein Palais, project, 1993, Graz, Neue Galerie Administration Building for Mayr-Melnhof Packaging Austria GmbH, planning/new construction, 1991, Frohnleiten, Styria Amusement and Industrial Park, Factory Outlet, study, 1998, Jöss, Styria Analog Architecture Generator (Analoger Architekturgenerator), object, 1987 • 178 Archdiploma 2007, exhibition design, 2007, Vienna, project space Karlsplatz • 203 Architecture as Seen by the Components (Architektur aus Sicht der Bauteile), poster, 2012 • 264 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 • 250 Art Lounge, interior conversion, 2002, Vienna, Brandstätte, Café Korb • 086 Art Lounge, redesign, 2007, Vienna, Brandstätte, Café Korb • 087 Austrian Cultural Institute, competition, 1992, New York • 224 Austrian Pavilion, Expo 2008, competition, 2007, Sevilla Autocatalytic Architecture, poster, 1997 • 266 Bad zur Sonne, Indoor Pool, competition/revitalization, 1997, Graz Bathhouse, new construction, 1993, Graz, Burgfriedweg • 184 Bathroom, interior conversion, 1982, Graz, Färbergasse Bathroom “for J. Baudrillard,” interior conversion, 1996, Jöss, Styria, Eybesfeld Castle • 110 Bathroom “for K. Schwitters,” interior conversion, 1983, Graz, Liebiggasse • 106 Bathroom for H. Kupelwieser, interior conversion, 1997, Graz, Lichtenfelsgasse • 112 Bathroom for M. M. O. Plottegg, interior conversion, 2007, Graz, Lichtenfelsgasse • 114 Bathroom with Laundry, interior conversion, 1996, Graz, Brandhofgasse • 108 Bathrooms with Stripes, interior conversion, 1982, Graz, Schillerstrasse; 1982, Vienna, Am Hof; 1983, Graz, Liebiggasse • 104 Beyond Art, exhibition design, 1998, Antwerp, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst • 194 Bit String, frozen image, 1994 • 026 Browse Architecture, poster, 1995 • 262 Bruseum Concept, exhibition design, 2012, Graz, Universalmuseum Burggarten Orangery, study, 1994, Graz Business and Residential Park, competition, 2009, Graz, Waltendorf Cash Desk, revitalization, 1992, Trautenfels Castle, Styria • 134 Cathedral of Intelligence, computer drawing, 1991 • 118 Cathedral of Intelligence, drawing, 2006 • 120 Cathedral of Intelligence, model, 2011 • 122 City Expansion Vienna South, competition, 1970, Vienna Clip-Clap Bathroom, interior conversion, 1990, Graz, Rieglgasse Collapsed Bed (Das zusammengebrochene Bett), object/installation, 1972, Graz, University of Technology • 072 College for Music and Musical Theater, competition, 1998, Graz Company Building, competition, 1986, Graz, Färberplatz • 238 Company Building, new construction, 1999, Graz, Kärntnerstraße Design Studio Exhibition 2010, exhibition design, 2010, Vienna, University of Technology • 248 Digital Architecture Generator (Digitaler Architekturgenerator), exhibition, 1991, Amersfoort, De Zonnehof • 037 District Commission Building, competition, 1996, Murau, Styria Doors, revitalization, 1992, Trautenfels Castle, Styria • 136 Drawing Eraser (Zeichnerradierer), hybrid object/tool, 1970 • 268 ESG Center, competition, 1995, Linz Event Halls for the State Medical Board of Registration, competition, 2000, Graz Exhibition Space Galerie & Edition Artelier, conversion, 2009, Graz, Hergottwiesgasse Eybesfeld Castle Housing Project, new construction, 2003, Jöss, Styria • 210 Eybesfeld Castle Housing Project, Green House, new construction, 2004, Jöss, Styria • 212

272 273

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 • 240 Fakeology, special lecture, April 1, 2001, Graz, University of Technology Firefighters Museum, revitalization/conversion, 1995, Groß Sankt Florian, Styria • 180 Firefighters Museum, addition/revitalization/conversion, 2003, Groß Sankt Florian, Styria Firefighters Museum, Glass Roof, conversion, 1998, Groß Sankt Florian, Styria Flamhof Castle, general refurbishment, 1986, Flamberg, Styria Flat, conversion, 1996, Graz, Brandhofgasse Flat and Office, conversion, 1980, Milan, Via Sardegna Fresh Bits & Pixels Every Day (Täglich frische Bits und Pixel), poster, 1987 • 261 Fringe Bathroom (Fransenbad), interior conversion, 1984, Graz, Brunngasse • 092 Fringe Car (Fransenauto), design/object, 1989 • 096 Fringe Helmet (Mohawk) (Fransenhelm), design/object, 1989 • 097 Galerie & Edition Artelier, new construction, 2006, Graz, Hergottwiesgasse • 166 Generativní Architektury, poster, 2009 • 256 Grammar School Graz West, competition, 1986, Graz Greater Graz Tax Office, planning/loft conversion, 1987, Graz Grinzing City Apartment, renovation/conversion, 1992, Vienna Hartberg Castle, competition/conversion, 2010, Hartberg, Styria Housing Development, competition, 1998, Feldkirchen, Styria Housing Development, competition, 1990, Graz, Banngrabenweg Housing Development “Society and Ecology,” international pilot competition, 2007, Gleisdorf, Styria • 222 Housing Development Irgang, new construction, 2003, Jöss, Styria Housing Development St. Peter, competition, 1987, Graz • 246 Housing Project for Hospital Employees, competition, 1990, Bruck/Mur, Styria Hybrid Architecture, computer design, 1981 • 156 Hybrid Architecture: Plottegg Ironing Against the Separation of Functions (Hybridarchitektur: Plottegg bügelt gegen die Funktionstrennung), poster, 2003 • 265 Hyper-Hybrid Architecture Generator (Hyper-Hybrid-Architekturgenerator), installation, 2008, platform in Second Life • 043 Hyper-Hybrid Architecture Generator, exhibition, 2008, Sevilla • 044 Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, exhibition design, 2002, Karlsruhe, Center for Art and Media • 198 Identity : Difference, exhibition design, 1992, Graz, Künstlerhaus • ­ 190 Identity : Difference, exhibition design, 1992, Graz, Burgring, Tummelplatz, Herrengasse, Hauptplatz, Sporgasse • 188 Inclusion : Exclusion, exhibition design, 1996, Graz, Reininghaus • 192 Inflatable Structures (Structures Gonflables), installation, 1968, Graz, University of Technology • 076 Intermedia Urbana, trigon ’71, competition, 1971, Graz Irgang Housing Estate, Lawn Houses, planning/new construction, 2005, Jöss, Styria Jagertratten Country House, renovation/conversion, 1996, Krakauhintermühlen, Styria Kalashnikov (soft version), object, 2009 • 154 Kunsthaus, competition, 2000, Graz • 230 Künstlerhaus, competition/refurbishment/functional changes, 2010, Graz Ladies’ and Men’s, interior conversion, 1992, Trautenfels Castle, Styria • 132 Ladies’ and Men’s at Café Korb (Damen und Herren im Café Korb), interior conversion, 2004, Vienna, Brandstätte, Café Korb • 088 Lambert Country House, renovation/general refurbishment, 1977, Stiwoll, Styria Landesmuseum Joanneum, Depot, conversion, 1994, Graz Landmark for the future (Zeichen für Graz), competition, 1994, Graz Landscape Museum Trautenfels Castle, general refurbishment, 1990, Trautenfels Castle, Styria Landtrattner Country House, renovation/conversion, 1979, Krakauhintermühlen, Styria Lawn House (Wiesenhaus), project, 1994, Pernitz, Lower Austria • 216 Lawn House, competition, 1991, Graz, Eggenberg • 218 Leoben Housing Development, new construction, 1992, Leoben, Sackgasse, Styria • 168 Line Seeking Concrete (Strich sucht Beton), prints, 1989, Graz, Haus der Architektur • 050

Line Seeking Concrete, installation, 1989, Graz, Haus der Architektur • 052 Literaturhaus, competition, 2000, Graz • 226 Loft Conversion, new construction, 1987, Graz, Grazbachgasse • 170 Main Square Design, competition, 1998, Feldkirchen, Carinthia Mariahilf Event Center, project study, 1984, Graz Media Tower, revitalization, 1999, Graz, Hergottwiesgasse • 164 Metamorphosis of a Town Flat (Metamorphose einer Stadtwohnung), installation/photomontage/drawing, 1972, Graz, University of Technology • 162 Mirror Toilet (Spiegelklo), prototype, 1979, Vienna • 234 Mixi 700 / Alpine Pagoda, model, 1999, Innsbruck, aut – Architektur und Tirol Mr Faust Playing Roulette (Herr Faust spielt Roulette), proposal for a stage design, 1986, Vienna, Akademietheater • 124 Neuronal Architecture Generator (Neuronaler Architekturgenerator), installation, 1999—2004, Karlsruhe, Center for Art and Media, Graz, Neue Galerie • 038 Nordsee I, installation, 1979, Graz, steirischer herbst • 208 Office Building, competition, 1989, Graz, Alberstraße Olafur Eliasson, Surroundings Surrounded, exhibition design, 2000, Graz, Neue Galerie One Pixel (Ein Pixel), drawing, 1994 • 027 Orcus, exhibition design, 2003, Graz, Literaturhaus Orcus, exhibition design, 2004, Vienna, Literaturhaus • 196 Palace Lugano, competition, 2000, Lugano, Switzerland Pécs, Capital of Culture, competition, 2007, Pécs, Hungary Penthouse, planning/loft conversion, 2010, Graz, Burgring Phantom of Desire, exhibition design, 2003, Graz, Neue Galerie • 196 Place a User’s Manual, exhibition design, 1995, Graz, Künstlerhaus • 186 Plottegg’s Plots, poster, 2000 • 267 Pneumatic, installation, 1997, Graz, Galerie & Edition Artelier • 078 Pneumatic, installation, 1998, Nice, Soardi Gallery • 082 Pneumatic, installation, 1999, Salzburg, Rupertinum • 084 Pneumatic, installation, 2000, Bregenz, Kunsthaus • 083 Portal and Bridge, new construction, 2007, Graz, Hergottwiesgasse Postmedia Condition, exhibition design, 2005, Graz, Neue Galerie Provincial Capital St. Pölten, competition, 1989, St. Pölten, Lower Austria Public Toilet, project, 1994, Eisenstadt, Domplatz • 182 Puha Szimbolumok / Soft Symbols, competition, 2005, Budapest • 152 Putting Allspace in a Notshell, competition, 1969, Graz, trigon ’69 • 028 Putting Allspace in a Notshell, installation, 2012, Graz, Universalmuseum Joanneum, Kunsthaus • 034 Regional Exhibition ’92, Pleasure & Pain (Lust & Leid), competition/exhibition design, 1992, Trautenfels Castle, Styria Regional Hospital, competition/conversion/annex, 1998, Knittelfeld, Styria Regional Vocational School, competition, 1992, Bad Gleichenberg, Styria Regional Vocational School, planning of conversion/annex, 1993, Mureck, Styria Residential Building, refurbishment/conversion, 2006, Graz, Eisengasse Residential Building, revitalization, 1989, Ehrenhausen, Styria, Ehrenhausenstraße Residential Building, revitalization, 1989, Ehrenhausen, Styria, Volkmaierstraße Residential Project, competition, 1992, Weiz, Styria RESOWI Centre, University of Graz, competition/computer-generated design, 1985, Graz • 172 Rocker Prototype, design/object, 1967, Karlsruhe, Center of Technology • 064 Rocker, edition, 2009, Graz, Artelier Contemporary • 065 Schallhof Country House, general refurbishment, 1984, Pernitz, Lower Austria Secondary School, competition, 1988, Lustenau, Vorarlberg Seiersberg Housing Development, project development/computer-generated design, 1987, Seiersberg, Styria • 142 Seiersberg Housing Development, construction, 1987, Seiersberg, Styria • 144 Seiersberg Housing Development, new construction, 1991, Seiersberg, Styria • 146 Semaine de Cuir, competition, 1984, Paris • 244 Shop, conversion, 1982, Milan, Via Rubens

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Shop Window Campaign Nordsee II, installation, 1982, Vienna Silberhof Country House, general refurbishment, 1976, Deutschfeistritz, Styria Siteless, poster, 1996 • 257 Spielberg Housing Development, computer-generated design, 1991, Spielberg, Styria • 046 Spot the Difference, poster, 2007 • 252 Startup Models, poster, 1995 • 260 Steps or Door, revitalization, 1992, Trautenfels Castle, Styria • 138 STEWEAG Graz, competition, 1996, Graz Stone Lamp “Model Rudi Dutschke” (Low Cost Lamp 2) (Steinlampe “Modell Rudi Dutschke”), design/object, 1992, Trautenfels Castle, Styria • 100 Styrian Yoga, film documentary, 1982, Graz, Forum Stadtpark • 204 The Architect as a Seismograph, statement, 1996 • 253 The Binary House (Das binäre Haus), generated architecture, 1988 • 054 The Binary House, poster, 1990 • 258 The Mescalin Paintings by Henri Michaux, exhibition design, 1998, Graz, Künstlerhaus The Narrow World (pneumatic construction) (Die enge Welt), installation, 1968, Graz, University of Technology The Plotteggs are coming, poster, 1995 • 254 The Recipe for Recipes, cooking recipe, 2005 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 • 263 Theater an der Wien, Foyer, competition, 2005, Vienna Toilet Shower (Klodusche), prototype, 2012, Graz • 237 Toilet Swing (Kloschaukel), object, 1999, Graz • 236 Tower Staircase, revitalization, 1989, Trautenfels Castle, Styria • 126 Town Hall Center, competition, 1998, Eisenstadt Trautenfels as seen by the components, film documentary/installation, 1993 • 206 Travelling Tantra Altar, object, 1977 • 160 Triangular Lamp (Low Cost Lamp 3), design/object, 1995 • 102 Trummelhof City Apartment, conversion, 1979, Vienna, Grinzing Tube Lamp (Low Cost Lamp 1), design/object, 1991 • 098 Typical Austrian Futon Construction, design/object, 1997, Graz, Neue Galerie, Vienna, MAK • 071 Urban E, Design Studio Exhibition 1999, installation, 1999, Vienna, University of Technology • 202 Urn Cemetery Graz, competition/computer-generated drawing, 1985, Graz • 148 Urn Cemetery Linz, competition/computer-generated drawing, 1999, Linz • 150 VBH Retzhof Castle Guest House, competition, 2007, Leibnitz, Styria video still.prn, prints, 1997, • 080 Villa Schilcher, conversion/annex, 2000, Graz, Rudolfstraße Villa Hartenau, loft conversion, 1990, Vienna, Weimarer Straße Vivarium, competition, 1998, 2002, Neumarkt, Mariahof, Styria • 228 Vocational School for Cooks and Waiters, study, 1990, Gleichenberg, Styria Vorläufer … precurseur … forerunner, design/object, 2010 • 066 Vorläufer … precurseur … forerunner as Space Element, rendering, 2010, Cologne, Orgatec • 068 Web of Life, installation, 2000, Karlsruhe, Center for Art and Media • 058 Web of Life, installation, 2002, Brisbane, Bratislava, Rotterdam, Zagreb, Stuttgart, a. o. • 062 William Kentridge, exhibition design, 1999, Graz, Neue Galerie WKO Conference and Event Hall, competition, 2010, Graz Wood in Housing Construction, competition, 1984, Styria • 242 Zalloni Country House, general refurbishment, 1981, Stübing, Styria ZUGZOOMSCHÖNSCHNELL, installation, 1987, shown all over Austria • 232

Solo and Group Exhibitions 2012 100 % Design, Vorläufer … precurseur … forerunner, London, Außenwirtschaft Österreich Salone Internazionale del Mobile, Vorläufer … precurseur … forerunner, Milano, Außenwirtschaft Österreich 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 2011 H. O. M. E. D. E. P. O. T., Vorläufer … precurseur … forerunner, Vienna, Semperdepot 2010 Pimp my chair, Forerunner, Berlin, AIT/Dietiker, St.-Johannes-Evangelist-Kirche Orgatec, Vorläufer … precurseur … forerunner, Cologne, furniture fair 2009 Architektur beginnt im Kopf / The Making of Architecture, Analoger Architekturgenerator, Vienna, Architekturzentrum, curated by E. Krasny (cat.) Generativní Architektury, solo exhibition, Prague, Austrian Cultural Forum 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 Kreuzungspunkt Linz. Junge Kunst und Meisterwerke, Tube Lamp (Licht mit Hirn), Linz, Lentos Kunstmuseum, curated by J. Schwanberg, D. Buchhart digital intuition — the design space for artificial learning, Neuronal Architecture Processor, London, nous gallery (cat.) 2008 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.) Floating in Limbo / Zwischen Fließen und Schweben, Tube Lamp (Low Cost Lamp 2), Vienna, Designforum, curated by C. Knechtl Sense Of Architecture, Eybesfeld Castle Housing Project, Green House / Trautenfels, Venedig, La Biennale di Venezia, curated by C. Pöchhacker 2007 Architektur in Wörtern, Zeitungsständer, Innsbruck, AUT – Architektur und Tirol, curated by G. Kaiser, K. Zweifel 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.) 2006 Spazio deformato, Neuronal Architecture Processor, Rom, ArteScienza 2006, curated by P. Weibel ArteScienza 2006, Web of Life / Neuronal Architecture Processor, Rom, Casa dell’Architettura, curated by P. Weibel (cat.) Sie nannten ihn Medienkünstler, Cathedral of Intelligence, Graz, Galerie Edition Artelier 2005 Light Art from Artificial Light, Tube Lamp (Low Cost Lamp 2), Karlsruhe, Center for Art and Media, curated by P. Weibel (cat.) 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 2004 The Austrian Phenomenon, Collapsed Bed / Inflatable Structures, Vienna, Architektur Zentrum, curated by J. Porsch, K. Ritter Algorithmic Revolution, Neuronal Architecture Processor, Karlsruhe, Center for Art and Media, curated by P. Weibel Reserve der Form, 3D Door, Door Steps Steps Door, Vienna, Künstlerhaus, curated by K. Stattmann (cat.) 2002 Die Rückkehr der Kommunikation, artlounge, Vienna, Café Korb 2001—2003 Web of Life, Architecture, Karlsruhe, Center for Art and Media (cat.) 276 277

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 1999 Zeichenbau / real virtualities, Neuronal Architecture Processor, Vienna, Künstlerhaus, curated by M. M. O. Wolff-Plottegg (cat.) Kogler & Plottegg, Pneumatic, Salzburg, Rupertinum 1998 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 Kogler & Plottegg, Pneumatic, Innsbruck, Widauer Gallery 1997 Kogler  &  Plottegg, Pneumatic, Graz, Galerie & Edition Artelier 1996 Beyond Art, Analoger Architekturgenerator / Digital generierter Entwurf (RESOWI), Budapest, Ludwig Múzeum, 1996; Graz, Neue Galerie, 1997; Antwerp, Museum van Hedendagse Kunst, 1998 (cat.) 1995 Architektur im 20. Jahrhundert, Seiersberg Housing Development / Trautenfels, Frankfurt, Deutsches Architekturmuseum (cat.) 1993 Architektur als Engagement, 3D Door, Door Steps Steps Door / Leoben Housing Development / Seiersberg Housing Development, Graz, Haus der Architektur (cat.) 1992 Computer Graphics in the Fine Arts, Digital prints, Banská Bystrica, State Gallery 1991 The Binary Room, solo exhibition, Zagreb, CAD Forum The Global Satellite, Digital Architecture Generator, Amersfoort, De Zonnehof 1990 The Binary House, solo exhibition, Munich, Architekturgalerie (cat.) 1989 Peripherie, Line Seeking Concrete, Graz, Haus der Architektur 1987 Zug der Züge, ZUGZOOMSCHÖNSCHNELL, Austria, ÖBB (Austrian Railway) Täglich frische Bits und Pixel, solo exhibition, Graz, Forum Stadtpark 1982 Styrian Yoga, movie presentation, solo exhibition, Graz, Forum Stadtpark 1981 Architektur aus Graz, Hybrid Architecture, Graz, Künstlerhaus (cat.) 1979 Shop Windows by Artists / L’art vitrinale, Nordsee I, Graz, steirischer herbst, curated by P. Weibel (cat.) 1968 Grazer Schule, Inflatable Structures, Graz, Forum Stadtpark

Books Architecture … Scripting, Vienna, Sonderzahl, 2011, ed. by C. Derix, C. Falkner, T. Grasl, M. Wolff-Plottegg, and R. Thum Hybridarchitektur & Hyperfunktionen, Vienna, Passagen Verlag, 2006 Architekturalgorithmen, Vienna, Passagen Verlag, 1996

Selected Contributions to Books 2013 “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 “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 “Die Welt des Sessels ist nicht die Welt des Sitzens,” in 30 × 2 Sessel/Stühle, ed. R. Schilcher, Artelier Collection, Literaturverlag Droschl, Graz “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 2007 “Typical Austrian Futon Construction,” in Lessons from Bernard Rudofsky. Life as a Voyage, ed. Architektur Zentrum, Birkhäuser, Basel 2006 “--- ,I, --- ( ) ---,” in Découverture, 27, ed. BIL BO K, Magazine des errances contemporaines, Paris 2005 “Besser als der gute Geschmack es verdaut. Das Rezept für Rezepte,” in Allegro ma non troppo, ed. I. Werner, Literaturverlag Droschl, Graz “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 2004 “… 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 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 “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 “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 “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 1998 “Der Demiurg. Die Kontingenz. Das Surfen,” in eigentlich könnte alles auch anders sein, ed. P. Zimmermann, Walther König, Cologne “Schloß Trautenfels,” in Dialogues in Time: New Graz Architecture, ed. P. Blundell Jones, Haus der Architektur Graz, Graz

278 279

1997 “Architekturalgorithmen,” in Jenseits von Kunst, ed. P. Weibel, Passagen Verlag, Vienna “Építészeti algoritmusok,” in A müvészeten túl, ed. P. Weibel, Ludwig Múzeum, Budapest 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 “Fransenbad,” in Bauen für die Sinne. Gefühl, Erotik und Sexualität in der Architektur, ed. C. Thomsen, Prestel, Vienna and New York 1995 “La possibilitá delle forme – dal computer all’architettura,” in Luoghi, 02, ed. S. Giovanazzi, Circolo Trentino per l’architettura contemporanea, Trento

Selected Contributions to Magazines 2012 “Digital und noch immer analog | Eine Zwischenbilanz,” in KONstruktiv, 286, Vienna 2003 “Hybridarchitektur,” in ST/A/R Städteplanung / Architektur / Religion, Vienna “Die Kunst des Machens,” in KONstruktiv, 239, Vienna 2002 “Architecture as Information Editor,” in Telematik, 01, Graz 2000 “Urban Entertainment,” in Architektur & Bau FORUM, 207, Vienna 1999 “Keine heiße Asche einfüllen!,” in Architektur & Bau FORUM, 203, Vienna “Real Virtualities,” in Architektur & Bau FORUM, 202, Vienna 1991 “Die synthetische Dimension,” in BauJournal, 12, Vienna 1990 “The Binary House & Interaction,” in Arteficiele Intuitie, Rotterdam

Selected Lectures 2012 “Architektur aus Sicht der Bauteile” (“Architecture as Seen by the Components”, MediaLab Lecture Series), Vienna, University of Technology “Sur le lien entre architecture et philosophie“ (“Die Architektur und die Philosophie in der Vergangenheit und in der Zukunft”), Vienna, Salon du livre francophone 2010 “Die Grazer Schule ist ein Fake” (international symposium), Graz, University of Technology

2009 “Zum Nachsalzen … Rezept für Rezepte > Methoden n-ter Ordnung” (“raum&designstrategien”), Linz, University of Art and Design “Functionalism beyond separation of functions: hyper- & hybrid-functions,” London, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL 2008 “Am anderen Ort … in anderer Verwendung,” Bolzano, Freie Universität “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 “Triple Lecture: Hybrid Architecture & Hyper-Functions,” London, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL “011001010101100110010010100001011101100010001010010,” Weimar, Bauhausuniversität 2007 “Hybridarchitektur  –  Plottegg bügelt gegen die Funktionstrennung” (“Hybrid Architecture: Plottegg Ironing Against the Separation of Functions”), Berlin, Universität der Künste “Bauen heißt ordnen, wohnen heißt aufräumen,” Graz, Gesellschaft und Ökologie “Ich fordere eine positive Verdeckungsbilanz,” Salzburg, Bauakademie 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 2005 “Dortmund Essen Darmstadt Klosterneuburg — eine gastrosophische/gastrophobische Exploration,” Vienna, Café Korb 2004 “Hybrid Architecture,” London, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL 2003 “Generative Systems III,” London, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL 2002 “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 2001 “escapism & excess in architecture and urbanism — design algorithms & superdensity,” London, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL “Faking Architectural Identities,” London, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL “20010621 fake” (“Sprechen über Architektur”), Vienna, ZV 2000 “The Ethical Function of Architecture,” Innsbruck, University “Architecture # Media > Architecture # Hypermedia,” London, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL “The Graz Plot,” London, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL “Prototype Projects,” London, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL “Generative Systems II,” London, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL “Arquitectura e Multimédia,” Porto, Universidade Católica Portuguesa “Architecture & Hypermedia,” Venice, La Biennale di Venezia “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

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1998 “Surf Surface Architecture,” Hamburg, Hochschule für bildende Künste “Browse Architecture / beta version 2.1,” Prague, Academy of Fine Arts 1997 “Autocatalytic Architecture,” London, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL 1996 “Ortlos. Zum Diskurs der Dislokation in der Architektur,” Innsbruck, University, Institut für experimentellen Hochbau 1993 “Maintaining the order of procedure” (“Architecture Unbound: Computers and the New Complexity”), New York “La soluzione del problema d’angolo nella Scuola di Graz,” Trento, Circolo d’Architettura Contemporanea 1990 “An inventory of forms, invented by computer,” Glasgow, University of Strathclyde

Selected Reviews on Plottegg’s Work Broekmann, R., “Veränderungen planen,” in build, 02, 2011 Chramosta, W., “Grimmi(n)ge(r) Gegenkodierungen,” in Architektur & Bau FORUM, 152, 1992 Derix, Ch., “Neuronal Architecture,” in Building Design, 2005 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 Gross, E., “Landschaftsmuseum Schloss Trautenfels,” in Architektur Steiermark, 2005 Hawlik, M., “Flexibler Wohnen,” in VIA International, 01, 2008 Hötzl, M., “Der Architekt als Funktionserfinder,” in Architektur & Bau FORUM, July 13, 2007 Krasny, E., “Mit allen Medien gewaschen,” in Die Presse, September 29, 2007 Kühn, Ch., “Nur keine Handschrift, bitte!,” in Die Presse / Spectrum, December 20, 1997 Marboe, I., “Rocker reloaded. Evolutionäres Sitzen,” in architektur. aktuell, 11, 2010 Marboe, I., “Neue Medien, neue Räume,” in KONstruktiv, 2009 Marboe, I., “Aufblasen und Absaugen,” in architektur. aktuell, 05, 2008 Nimmervoll, L., “Über den Unterschied zwischen Unis und Oper,” in Der Standard, March 30, 2010 Silhan, A., “Architektur und mediale Umwelt,” in Wiener Zeitung, September 27, 2007 Steger, B., “Hybridarchitektur,” in Architektur & Bau FORUM, April 16, 2007 Steinle, C., “Putting allspace in a notshall,” in Rewind / Fast Forward, Neue Galerie Graz, 2009 Tabor, J., “Sinnlichkeit im Keller,” in Falter, 30, 2004 Thun, B., “Pflanzenhaus,” in Architektur, February 01, 2007 Titz, W., “Wohnbau GGW-Seiersberg,” in Architektur Graz, 2003 Tschavgova, K., “Vom Fordern und Bereichern,” in Die Presse / Spectrum, July 01, 2007 Waldinger, I., “Zeitmesser Fassade,” in Architektur & Bau FORUM / SKIN, 01, 2007 Woltron, U., “Bauen im Datenstrom,” in Der Standard, December 19, 2000 Woltron, U., “Der computergenerierte Wal hat einen Auspuff,” in Der Standard, May 29, 1999

Thanks to

Copyrights Friedrich Achleitner, author • 254 Lukas Antoni, EDP programming Armin Blasbichler, office staff Arne Böhm, office staff Alfred Boric, office staff Harald Burgsteiner, EDP programming Giovanna Crisci, office staff Georg Giebeler, office staff Michael Grobbauer, office staff Georg Gröller, analyst Andreas Gruber, architect, EDP programming • 040, 134, 140, 148, 224, 238 Peter Helweger †, architect Michael Homann, office staff Martin Huth, installations Niko Kastner, installations Orhan Kipcak, informatics Peter Kogler, artist • 078, 082, 083, 084, 166 Peter Kompolschek, office staff Wolfgang Kreilinger, office staff Sabine Krischan, office staff Hans Kupelwieser, artist • 037, 112, 152, 154, 253 Wolfgang Maass, informatics • 038 Fritz Mascher, architect • 142 Gerhard Polzer, office staff Alexander Putz, office staff Jeffrey Shaw, artist • 058, 186 Hartmut Skerbisch †, artist • 028, 030, 032, 034 Johannes Sperlhofer, EDP programming Peter Szammer, EDP programming Michael Tritthart, associate 1977—1983 Peter Weibel, artist, curator • 044, 086, 188, 190, 192, 194, 196, 198, 200, 257, 266 Petra Winterheller, office staff Rainer Wührer, office staff Christoph Zechner, architect • 054, 142, 148, 170, 232, 238, 242, 244, 246 Martin Zechner, architect • 124, 172, 176 Finn Zeder, office staff Peter Zimmermann, artist • page 254

In case that not all copyright holders could be contacted despite all efforts to do so, claims will be settled along the usual lines upon request. Archiv der Neuen Galerie Graz — Universalmuseum Joanneum • 196 top, 197 top David Auner • 033, 035 Tom Fürstner • 086, 089, 090, 091 Peter Kogler • 078, 079, 082, 083, 084, 085 Hans Kupelwieser • 152, 153, 154, 155 Williams Larry • 252 Paul Ott • 050, 051, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 146, 147, 152, 168, 169, 180, 188, 189, 190, 191, 255 wikimedia • 126 ZKM Karlsruhe, Center for Art and Media • 059, 060, 061, 062, 063 All other Images: Architekturbüro Plottegg

Special Thanks to Joseph Giovannini, author

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Publisher’s Note Editor and author: Manfred Wolff-Plottegg Author: Joseph Giovannini Translations: Wolfgang Astelbauer, Yplus Copy editing: Wolfgang Astelbauer, Stefan Schwar, ad literam Production/Project management: Angelika Heller, Birkhäuser Verlag GmbH, Vienna Editorial design and layout: Florian Jungwirth, Dynamowien, Vienna Scans and image editing: LOOK Piculjan GmbH, Graz Printing and binding: Holzhausen Druck GmbH, Wolkersdorf Typefaces: Klavika and Swift Neue Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the German National Library The German National Library lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in other ways, and storage in data­bases. For any kind of use, permission of the copyright owner must be obtained. This publication is also available as an e-book (ISBN PDF 978-3-0356-0742-0; ISBN EPUB 978-3-0356-0733-8). © 2015 Birkhäuser Verlag GmbH, Basel P. O. Box 44, 4009 Basel, Switzerland Part of Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston © Manfred Wolff-Plottegg, Lichtenfelsgasse 13, 8010 Graz, Austria Printed on acid-free paper produced from chlorine-free pulp. TCF ∞ Printed in Austria ISBN 978-3-0356-0916-5 987654321 www.birkhauser.com

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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. Currently he is teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava. 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.

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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 quickand-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.