The Art of Joyful Jam-Packing

By KURT ANDERSEN

Hans Hollein bristles at being called a master of the exquisite small space. He denies that his architecture depends on perfect, peculiar details and even disagrees with the plain truth that his buildings are playful. It may be that Hollein, a Viennese, is habitually defensive about his work because so much of it has been both small scale and high end: jewelry stores, a travel agency, an art gallery. The quirky architect will not have to worry about professional stature any longer. Last week, a few days after his 51st birthday, Hollein was awarded the seventh annual Pritzker Architecture Prize, the closest thing in the field to a Nobel. The prize, established and underwritten by Chicago Multimillionaire Jay Pritzker, comes with a tax-free gift of $100,000.

Hollein can use the money. He is not widely known. Relatively few of his designs have been built, and most of those were reconstructions and renovations. Some Pritzker jurors were concerned about his comparatively skimpy oeuvre. In the end, however, he was allowed a European handicap: on the Continent, there are not many opportunities for the expansive architectural gesture, and fewer buildings are being built than in the U.S.

Denied the option of spreading his architectural imagination thin, Hollein has instead produced dense, intense buildings where every detail is fussed over and elaborately wrought. For one American admirer, Architect Michael Graves, the pleasure of a Hollein building comes from "the personal attention he gives his work. You truly sense the artist's hand controlling every detail." In fact, Hollein is also a gallery artist, but he finds praise like Graves' somewhat backhanded. "Exquisite craftsmanship and careful detailing are what an architect ought to be expected to deliver," Hollein says. "I don't think you should be applauded for it."

Hollein has flouted the fetishes of dead-end, blank-box modernism--perhaps out of principle but perhaps also because he could not dream of bridling his ferocious drive to invent and surprise. He seems to create buildings with the spirit other architects might bring to an amusement park. His work at its best is lyrical and joyously jam-packed, smart and sensuous, like a Nabokov story. He believes buildings should even be erotic. In the first of two shops he designed for Schul- lin jewelers in Vienna--a plush, narrow space with an irregular fissure in the gleaming facade--the allusion seems downright genital.

Like most postmodernists, Hollein says he is not a postmodernist. But as the Pritzker citation declared, he is "one who with wit and eclectic gusto draws upon the traditions of the New World as readily as upon those of the Old." Says Hollein: "I was never afraid to use materials in new contexts--plastics or alu- minum or marble, and all this together." Nowhere does he put more forms and materials together better than in his museum of contemporary art in Monchengladbach, West Germany. The Pritzker ostensibly honors a lifetime of work, but surely it is Monchengladbach that got the prize for Hollein. The three-year-old hillside museum is like a tiny town within a town, an agglomeration of distinct but compatible structures, a labyrinth set on its own stone Platz. Undula- ting red brick terraces hug the slope, relaxed and vaguely mock-ancient, not abrasive Disneyland replicas. As ever, Hollein succeeds in pleasing with the highly particular small space, the odd cutout corner or voluptuous semicircular marble stair. Monchengladbach has the virtuoso exuberance of a big, ambitious first novel, brimming with every story fragment and shimmery turn of phrase the author can muster.

It is apt that Americans have now given Hollein his honorific due. The U.S., he says, has influenced his architecture most of all. He arrived at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1958 but found its "Prussian dogma" of modernism uncongenial. Breaking free, Hollein bought a Chevy and drove, covering 50,000 miles in a year and a half, just when Nabokov's Humbert Humbert and Kerouac's romantics were on the road. Recalls Hollein: "It was just incredible to me the space you have here, the sense of freedom." Seeing the West provoked a kind of epiphany. A generation ago, before pizazz had become architecturally fashionable, Hollein was out there on his own, learning from Las Vegas.