In 1969, decades before winning the Pritzker Prize, Austrian architect Hans Hollein built an inflatable mobile office that could be carried around and set up practically anywhere. Prophesying what would later become a laptop, the project—part pneumatic architecture, part performance, part video art—involved Hollein landing a small airplane on a runway and setting up the portable, plastic space, in which he could be seen talking on the telephone and typing.

At the time, Hans Hollein's 'Mobile Office' explored the social and architectural possibilities brought on by the advancement of new technologies. But it also forecasted their implications for the new worker and the way labor would be effected by an increasingly automated environment. In showing the potential for work to be exported virtually anywhere, Hollein's performance anticipated the shifting promises offered by modernity from one of spare time and leisure, to a life full of work. In the following essay by Andreas Rumpfhuber, the author explores Hollein's paradigmatic project in order the understand these workplace disruptions as they relate to the practice of architecture, in particular. 

The following essay is an excerpt from Rumpfhuber's work Into the Great Wide Open—a book about a search for a form of practice in architecture, put out by the Barcelona-based publishing house dpr-barcelona last fall. It is featured here as part of Archinect's recurring Screen/Print series. 

The Architect As Entrepreneurial Self 
Hans Hollein's TV performance Mobile Office (1969)

By Andreas Rumpfhuber

Hans Hollein’s ‘Mobile Office’ (1969) has been catalogued as an installation consisting of PVC-foil, a vacuum cleaner, a typewriter (Hermes Baby), a telephone, a drawing board, a pencil, rubber, and thumbtacks. In fact, Mobile Office is a two-minutes-and-twenty-seconds-long performance exclusively produced for television. It paradigmatically shows the contours of an emerging shift in architectural practice that must be read in parallel to the radical transformations in the organization of labour in the postwar years. It is exactly then that the Fordist business organization in Western industrialized countries, with its hierarchic structures, becomes fragile in favor of a new workers’ society. To read Mobile Office as a paradigmatic project mirroring aspects of this very transformation allows me to understand alterations, shifts, and disruptions in the practice of architecture. It allows me to identify and analyze the contours of a potentially new focus in the work of an architect. It helps me to trace the implications for the work and the product of architects at the very moment of the alleged shift in Western industrialized societies from a Taylorist organization of production towards today’s dominant form, the post-Fordist production of immaterial labour. Thus, the analysis of Mobile Office makes exemplarily visible the tendency towards today’s generalized and ‘proletarized’ form of creative entrepreneurs and their production.

The becoming dominant of an organization paradigm

The transformation in the 1960s and 1970s of Western industrialized societies from a Fordist model and its Taylorist organization of work processes towards a post-Fordist model and its becoming dominant of immaterial form of production has been widely discussed. Discourses in gender and queer studies have described a transition from the mass worker to the ‘labourer of society’. Maurizio Lazzarato introduced the concept of ‘immaterial labour’, expanding the traditional Marxian concept of labour with a multitude of social productions, and ultimately it was Mario Tronti who first coined the notion of the ‘factory of society’, in which the formerly confined factory literally spills out into the city. All of these descriptions imply the implementation of a popular and rather technocratic understanding of cybernetics as the core principle of governance into the work-processes of the post-war years. It conceives humans, as well as machines and automats, as autonomous self-directing entities whose behavior is understood as coded and thus able to be re-programmed. This is made possible by placing the emphasis on information flow within an organization that needs to be optimized. That is, cybernetic logic understands human beings and calculating machines and automats as equal entities on the same hierarchic level when it comes to processing information. Calculating machines and automats start to take over repetitive work processes that are based on known information and routines that can be coded. Within this logic, workers need to take over work processes that are based on a high degree of choice and on unknown information, which calculating machines, for the time being, cannot process. In this very moment, all the workers left in the factory or in the office are addressed as specialists—as creative workers, or as knowledge workers—who must take on the responsibility for their decisions within the organization of a corporation. Simultaneously, teamwork and strict codes of conduct are introduced in order to secure decision-making processes. This introduction of automation in the factory, but also in the administration—of companies and the state, on both sides of the iron curtain—was accompanied by the popular promise of dismissing everybody in the near future into everlasting spare time, the so-called leisure society.

In this sense, the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism in the 1960s and 1970s anticipates a contemporary condition in Western industrialized societies, of which the ‘factory of society’ is its precise spatial metaphor. The old dictum of spatial and temporal simultaneity and concurrence of work processes, as well as the functionally distinct well-defined attribution of spaces of production, disintegrates with these new organizations of a labour concept that is becoming increasingly diffuse. Yet this new situation also produces a new kind of worker who adapts and affirms this new organization of labour: they need to exercise knowledge based on creative work, they become entrepreneurs and take on the responsibility for what they are doing, no matter if one is still employed or has already been outsourced. Thus, today’s modes and means of production not only require different spatial configurations for work that are permanently and continuously manifest in new and unprecedented formations and structures, it also requires a different workers’ subject.

With Mobile Office, Hans Hollein portrays himself as a new type of an architect, a new type of labourer in a new workers’ reality.

These alterations in the organization of work, accompanied by the popular promise of the leisure society to come, also affected architects and their objects in manifold ways. Noticeable in this context are the many avant-garde projects of the 1950s and 1960s in which labour already seems to have been abolished and life consists in circling around the play and self-organization of free subjects in their endless spare time. In this context, Hans Hollein’s performance is very unique. With Mobile Office, Hans Hollein portrays himself as a new type of an architect, a new type of labourer in a new workers’ reality. Hollein anticipates that the new workers’ reality is not that of endless spare time, and not even the promised twenty-hour-week. Instead, life is full of work. In front of and with the TV-cameras rolling, he challenges and alters various aspects of the traditional architect’s practice: be it the mode of appearance and performance of the architect; be it the act of drawing as the core of the work of an architect, as well as the status of the drawing itself; or be it finally the status, the representation, and the organization of the architectural object. In a specific way, Mobile Office portrays the deferral of societies’ organizational and technological advancements against the bourgeois understanding of the work of the architect. Inasmuch as Hollein stages the transparent bubble as an envelope for working, and certainly not for leisure, he makes architecture visible, as a specific part of a palpable situation of a new formation of labour. In its presentation via television, he relates significant and typical conditions of a nomadic living- and working-formation to architecture and its specific quality and materiality.

2:20 Minutes

“Hello, this is Hollein … Yes, I just arrived at the airfield Aspern … Yes, I just finished the house. It will be delivered at once. You can look at it in a second.”

The 2min 20sec performance starts with a young Hans Hollein seesawing in a rocking chair. He is wearing a woollen jumper, a shirt, and black trousers. Next to him on the floor, and behind him on the shelves, there are piles of books and print-outs. He explains: “The idea of the To-Carry-Around-House is derived from today’s way of living.” He goes on to speak about the modern nomad, the caravan, and his idea of the house that can be folded into a suitcase. CUT. A small propeller-driven aircraft rolls along an airstrip. In the far background, Vienna’s 1964 Danube Tower, with its radio and television masts, looms against the summer sky. The cabin door is open. There is a pilot and two male passengers sitting in the aircraft. CUT. The airplane stands still. Both of the passengers get out of the plane. The one with long blonde hair and sunglasses is the 34-year-old architect Hans Hollein. He wears a leather jacket, a white shirt, light-coloured trousers and carries a black suitcase. His bearded companion, Franz Madl, wears a white shirt and tie. He carries a wooden drawing board and a T-square. Both men head for the lawn next to the airstrip. CUT. The suitcase is open. An alien-looking foil-like material glistens in the bright sunlight. The two men start to unpack and unfold the transparent sheet. Hollein takes a black tube attached to a hoover-like apparatus suddenly lying around on the grass and attaches it to a latch on the membrane. CUT. The membrane is blown up to a saggy bubble. Hollein crawls into it. He squats in the bubble. His companion passes him the architect’s working utensils—the drawing board, the T-square, and paper. Hollein closes he lid to the outside world and sits in his bubble. Madl turns the apparatus to full power. Now the bubble stands vertically, like a cigar. It is shiny and transparent. The voice-over explains: “This all might sound somewhat crazy, but is already in use for sport facilities in other countries. For protection against the weather.” CUT. One sees a close-up of the bubble with Hollein inside. Hans Hollein’s hair stands on end. Again, an off-screen explanation:“Hollein once wrote: Today, architecture is in exile, on the moon or at the north pole, and all the people are building on and on, just houses, houses, houses, houses…” CUT. Hollein sits cross-legged in the bubble with the drawing board on his lap. His companion stands there looking at him with curiosity. The architect works in the bubble. He draws with ruler, triangle, and pencil. CUT. One sees the same working position from a different angle. CUT. The camera frames a close-up of a telephone that suddenly sits there on the drawing board on Hollein’s lap. The telephone rings. Hollein picks it up and a dialogue unfolds: “Hello, this is Hollein … Yes, I just arrived at the airfield Aspern … Yes, I just finished the house. It will be delivered at once. You can look at it in a second.” Now one sees the drawing that Hollein has produced: a small villa with a pitched roof, a high chimney, and a garden wall. At that very moment, Hollein draws the smoke coming out of the chimney, telling his conversation partner on the phone: “Yes, a very modern design, yes. As you ordered … Goodbye.” CUT, and a long shot. Music. The wide lawn, on the horizon a few bushes, a cloudless sky, to the left of the picture the hoover-like apparatus to which the bubble is attached, the envelope (hülle) almost dissolves visually, becoming barely noticeable. Only through some reflections and shadows can one vaguely discern the bubble. Hollein continues to work on the drawing. He looks up from his work for a brief moment. CUT. Hans Hollein and his companion sit once more in the small plane. This time, Hollein is the pilot and puts on a helmet…

Here ends the performance of Mobile Office, or the To-CarryAround-House, as it was called by Hans Hollein. The performance was produced in the summer of 1969 as a part of a episode about Hollein on the post-war TV series Das österreichische Portrait (The Austrian Portrait). Mobile Office is a 2min 20sec segment in the 30min portrait of Hollein. It was aired in the early evening of the second Sunday of Advent that same year. Hollein does not represent his intimate space in its conventional meaning or by traditional means. Television allows for experimenting with a different form of representation of architecture, but also gradually shifts the role of the architect. With the help of cameras, an architecture-drawing is produced as an exemplar depicting a nomadic cosmopolitan workers’ future and its architecture. The architect himself plays different roles: he is the storyteller in the rocking chair, he is the young dynamic working nomad, he is the architect with commissions from all around the world. In this sense, Mobile Office is an architecture of information and its message is being transported through a new medium, television.

The entrepreneur virtuoso and his space

The half-hour portrait constructs Hollein’s sentimental relationship with tradition-steeped Vienna, and Austria as a whole. It constructs a proximity to his revolutionary ideas, as they would be called, to the history of Austria and its architecture, but also to the cosy way of living of the long-gone imperial metropolis Vienna, to the horse carriages, to the Riesenrad ferris wheel, etcetera. The cornerstones of his biography are told as follows. He was born and raised in the fourth district of Vienna, where he still lives with his wife. He went to school in the neighbourhood and going on to study architecture at Clemens Holzmeister’s master class at the Academy of Fine Arts in Schillerplatz. After graduating, he worked in Sweden and then did his master’s degree in architecture in California, USA. He became famous with the refurbishment of the candle shop Retti. Now, he is a professor in Düsseldorf, Germany. At the same time, he is about to build a bank in Vienna, as well as a gallery on 79th Street in New York City. He is working on a project for the World’s Fair in Osaka, Japan, and on a project for Olivetti in Amsterdam. At the beginning of the episode, Hollein is being introduced as a creative architect who thinks beyond the norm(al): “I am not the kind of architect who only builds” he says; “I am interested in miscellaneous… also commercials and things like that. I present products. I am something of an idea man.” (0:39)3 In other words, he is a virtuoso, always a bit crazy, visionary, but still pragmatic, always interested in finding solutions to problems. 

Hollein presents himself as a kind of hybrid working subject; he is the cosmopolitan entrepreneur and an outstanding creative worker.

Hollein presents himself as a kind of hybrid working subject; he is the cosmopolitan entrepreneur and an outstanding creative worker. Yet he is goal-oriented and lives a stable life. He works on a multitude of projects of different scales around the world. Still, he also works in teams. He collaborates, for example, with his wife, who is an haute-couture designer, and designed the costumes and suits for the Austrian Pavilion at the Milan Triennial exhibition in 1968. Hollein is not only an architect, he is also a designer of objects, an art-director, and an artist. Yet, he is also an entrepreneur: he is active and self-employed, he is innovative. To borrow a term coined by the German sociologist Ulrich Bröckling, Hans Hollein shows the initial contours of the ‘enterprising self’. Published in 2007, Bröckling takes up today’s general imperative that everybody ought to become an entrepreneur. He analyses the societal maelstrom and the discursive diagram that this imperative had released. He speaks of normative requirements, but also about new choices and opportunities, institutional arrangements, and about the social and individual technologies that regulate the behavior of the enterprising self. In doing so, he lays out a grammar of governing and self-governing, describing the currents that carry people away, circumscribing the dynamic of an increasingly economized society. 

To read Hollein as an ‘enterprising self’ highlights an otherwise underexposed relationship between architecture and economic discourses that goes beyond a discussion about building norms and the economic framing that restrains the architect’s creativity. Rather, this reading takes into account that architects themselves are enmeshed in societal discourses. They are shaped by a dominant economic logic and its imperatives. Yet they also act upon this logic by affirming the situation and responding to it. 

In general terms, the modern architect’s work is based on a bourgeois mode of work that primarily comprises communication and produces value by applying knowledge and exchanging services. This is true for two distinct modes of work within the practice of architecture. On the one hand, there has always been the architect-entrepreneur. He—as the traditional history of architecture discourse primarily knows males—has always been discussed as a singular master and public intellectual. This part of architectural practice is a mode of productivity that today can be described with the neologism ‘networking’. On the other hand, the work of the architect, or more precisely of the many collaborators and co-workers of the architect-entrepreneur, pursues a more mundane activity: that of the drawing and constant re-drawing of endless variations of a façade, a layout, a section, or the detail of a building. This is the production of communication material for clients, the public, and not least, for other professionals involved in the production of the built environment. 

Thus, in the words of Maurizio Lazzarato when describing the general concept of immaterial labour, the work of the architect, as it is generally understood, needs to be considered to be a specific form of labour that “produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity”.5 Lazzarato refers to changes in companies in the industrial and tertiary sector itself, where the skills needed for labour processes increasingly involved skills in cybernetics and the control of computers. On the other hand, he points towards intellectual activities that were not normally recognized as work but that were generally understood as the privilege of the bourgeoisie and their children, who in the post-war years became part of the domain that has been defined as ‘mass intellectuality’. Lazzarato argues that these profound changes not only modified the organization of production, but also the function of intellectuals towards a generalization of their activities.

Mobile Office depicts the value-creating form of practice generally known as architecture. Yet it radicalizes the traditional understanding of the work of the architect, as well as its product. On the one hand, it is the public figure of the architect-entrepreneur, one who networks, that merges with the architect-worker, who produces drawings. Thus, the performance of Mobile Office depicts an act of labour whose purpose lies in itself. It is a work process that solely exists through communication. In that sense, it is work that produces an object that cannot be isolated from its performance (handeln),6 as the Italian philosopher Paolo Virno described it. It is not so much about knowledge- and information- based work in its original meaning, where knowledge would be presented as a kind of product, but it is rather labour in that it finds its compliance and its purpose in itself. It is structured like a musician playing a concert. Virtuosity, the practice that was formerly attributed exclusively to the artist, has become a generalized category that implies the presence of others. Today, we find its generalized form in various guises within the cultural industries, in consulting, in information technologies, in design and advertising, in tourism and finance, as well as in entertainment and research.

Yet there is also a spatial aspect that closely correlates with this kind of labour performance of Mobile Office. As Paolo Virno further pointed out, post-Fordist immaterial labour takes on the traditional characteristics of political acting (politische handlung). It has become a prerequisite to expose oneself to the gaze of the other, and this requires a space that is structured like the public. Metaphorically speaking, it is in the space of television where Hollein appears to make his spectacle public. At the same time, one needs to recognize that although the space of television is structured like the public, as is the stage for the musician in a concert, there is a traditionally distinct border or boundary between the one performing and the audience observing. The architecture of the stage produces, simply, a distance. For Virno, this distance is being abolished in the new organization of labour. The monologic character of work disappears and the relationship to the other becomes the constitutive prerequisite for a labour that from now on needs to get along without a script. Yet, as an architect, Hollein emphasizes the very need for distance in the performance itself, but also explicitly in the design and use of the bubble. By pragmatically anticipating the new workers’ reality he produces architecture for this very situation out of his own experience. The workplaces of the young architect are “his flat … on the way to his building sites, the airplane, and his third workplace is his atelier.”(12:55) His workplaces have no boundaries: his office is not only everywhere and mobile but also extended—living and working become one and the same. The atelier, the airplane, and his flat must allow all different programs, and a multitude of functions; they are all workplaces and places for living at the same time. Hollein lives and works anywhere, be it in his rocking chair or in his transparent pneumatic construction. The space for living and the space for working converge. 

Despite and exactly because of this convergence, the pneumatic bubble is an architectural prototype of a new paradigm of a creative entrepreneurial subject: the soft and squashy sphere isolates the architect from their immediate surroundings. It produces an insular indoor climate in which the worker is immersed and thus, no matter where, becomes active, and is only then able to work. In other words, the bubble is—through design—the precondition for nomadic and precarious modes of work, modulating itself, as Hollein points out, from place to place. As a kind of outstanding element, the iconic design’s affects are twofold: on the one hand, the bubble is its own metaphor; it is its own thought bubble and represents the absolute monadic enclosure of the working subject. On the other hand, the bubble is not functionally determined; it is not a production space for a group of people but decidedly an ironically prototypic single-workplace for a boundless worldwide daily grind. It is a technologically-feasible and socially-conceivable vision that Hollein presents on television. The above-mentioned two-minute clip that represents the Mobile Office is part of a series of utopias at the end of the 1960s that, as the art critic and historian Helmut Draxler mentions, are composed by technological and social utopias. Draxler argues that the pre-condition for these projects was the stable and secure economic prosperity attributable to Keynesian economic policy. Along with technological and constructive innovations, this was accountable for conceiving feasible utopias for the near future—but not so much utopias of hope and salvation.

Still the Mobile Office is not architecture in a conventional sense, but part of a series of Hollein’s early projects that deal with the radical extension of the concept of architecture and design.

Mobile Office is a decidedly pragmatic vision of a workers’ society. Hollein uses everyday objects that are more or less trivial and unimportant items from modern life in 1969, emphasising and demonstrating the normal and current character of the project. In using these objects in a twisted way, he then also asserts their difference: the Hoover as a compressor, the airplane as an everyday vehicle, the suitcase to transport one’s own dwelling, or the mobile phone. The portable bubble in which Hollein sits and works is introduced on television as something that everybody is familiar with in a more conventional form: the trailer, the caravan. Still the Mobile Office is not architecture in a conventional sense, but part of a series of Hollein’s early projects that deal with the radical extension of the concept of architecture and design. By using and adopting artistic means and strategies, Hollein reacts to various social (but also technological) developments to make them, on the one hand, visible, and on the other hand, possible to pursue and research, to extend and radicalise by means of architecture and design. The projects Extension to the University of Vienna (1960), the architecture capsule series Nonphysical Environmental Control Kit (1967), or the Space-Spray Svobodair (1968, with Peter Noever), to name just a few, deal with media and immaterial aspects of a man-made environment as architecture. Instead of built architecture, Hollein conceives an immaterial architecture of pure affects—a kind of exceeding atmospheric simulation: the TV set as an extension to the university, the architecture pill to construct a non-physical environment, or, in collaboration with the Austrian office furniture producer Svoboda, a spray that immediately changes the workers’ atmosphere as a revolutionary way to improve the office.

These projects illustrate Hollein’s singular approach to architecture, which is about architecture as a system and therefore, goes beyond the three-dimensional object, extending the concept of architecture and design he also highlights in his famous manifest-like text “Alles ist Architektur” (Everything is Architecture). Mobile Office traces “Alles ist Architektur” in its full radicalism. In doing so it takes up a moment that Craig Buckley observes in his discussion of Hollein’s manifesto:

Between these images one begins to pick up
an alternate repetition present in the manifesto,
one that shifts from the image of the body to
its extensions. Citing the “telephone booth”,
the “helmets of jet pilots”, and the “development
of space capsules and space suits”, the expansion
of the human environment proceeds by becoming
smaller, departing from a “building of minimal size
extended into global dimensions” to approach
the contours of the subject. The dynamic of ex-
tension and contraction stretches the para-
doxically inclusive logic of the manifesto, which
expands architecture to be identified with
all things but regrounds this manifold in
one thing: architecture.

Mobile Office follows the postulation that everything could be architecture, and returns to architecture. In contrast to all immaterialised experiments, the Mobile Office is tangible architecture. The inflatable bubble is a radical design for a nomadic work-life that is able to modulate itself from place to place. It is a hybrid object between the arts: it is architecture, it is installation; and, most importantly, it is being broadcast on television—it is pure communication.

Instantaneous programming

In his texts, Hollein stresses the effects of architecture, the impact that the environment has on people. For him, this environment is always already man-made, in his sense, an artificial environment. In “Alles ist Architektur” he described a topologic situation: men and women are part of an environment that they themselves construct, but it conditions every single one of them, as well as society (the individual is always and already part of a group, a society). At the same time, people act on this environment; they extend it and re-create new artificial environments. Thus, Hollein writes: “Again and again, physically and psychologically, the human being extends his physical and psychological area, affects his environment in the broadest sense.”9 Thus, the vast plane on which the bubble is staged is already constructed as an environment made by people and implies already all world-spanning (cybernetic) infrastructure. The field is an open extensive plane that is not yet functionally determined, yet it is equipped with all the technology needed to blow up a bubble or to plug in a telephone. Furthermore, it neither follows a visible grid, nor has a quantitative observable order. The infrastructure and its knots are just there, they are assumed, do not require highlighting, or even definition. They are just there, as Hollein would comment: “… and everywhere … I can blow up this thing.” (09:35)

The bubble is the extreme version of a minimal enclosed environment. It is, in Hollein’s terms, a better contemporary dwelling, architecture that goes beyond mere function, that assures physical protection but also offers psychological shelter and at the same time acts as a symbol. It is a kind of architecture that is, on the on hand, an apparatus that isolates one from inhospitable (man-made) environments, as do the space suit and the space capsule, while at the same time it also allows for communication with others far away. It is an architecture that adapts itself to every single place.

As an envelope conceived for an individual, the pneumatic construction updates itself in each and every situation and with each new program. It is, in a twofold way, programmatically open. Firstly, it is its own relationality towards the outside. Ideally, it can constantly adapt itself to its context, as Hollein emphasizes. Secondly, it is in itself a functionally open interior. Depending on its use, the portable house—as Hollein would call his design in the 1969 television broadcast—becomes a nomadic dwelling or a workplace, finally becoming the Mobile Office. Similar to simple objects of minimal art—as the German philosopher Juliane Rebentisch points out—that are continuously readable as thing and as sign, that address the observer not only as the producer of meaning, but at the same time, is already constantly subverting the production of meaning,10 the bubble of the Mobile Office allows a constant programming of the functions of its space. The dwelling becomes what one uses it for. In the specific case of the TV performance it becomes a workplace—the Mobile Office. If Hollein had slept in it, it would be probably known today as the “Mobile Bedroom”. 

The bubble’s distinct quality is to adapt itself to every situation, as contemporary workers need to adapt themselves to every situation. The design accepts the dictum of a continuously required adaptability, of an architecture of maximised flexibility. Yet the design does not simply produce a flexible object that adapts itself to functions that are assigned in advance, but more in the spirit of structuralism, it produces an object without attributes that, depending on use, is in the process of becoming. With his design of the Mobile Office, Hollein affirms a specific situation in which the modern flexible working nomad is thrown out into the inhospitable sheer endless spaces of non-places (to use a phrase by Marc Augé) that is part of an even larger infrastructure that guarantees the same standards worldwide. Hollein’s design, however, withdraws from an idea of efficiency that would describe space through a dense catalogue of requirements, and creates an object that is—due to its material qualities and to its configuration—able to house a multitude of programs. At the same time, the practice of the architect alters in order to become performative: be it the acting out of the actual architect, or be it the drawing. 

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