Victoria Bugge Øye // Coop Himmelblau´s Architecture Machines, Vienna c. 1970
This dissertation considers the early work of Viennese architecture group Coop Himmelblau as it negotiates the role of architecture in the changing landscape of cultural and scientific institutions in Austria immediately before and after the appointment of a Socialist government in 1970. By tracing how a singular and understudied body of work can engage multiple registers and forms of encounters, the dissertation theorizes the shifting relationship between architecture, technologies, and disciplines of knowledge following the decades after WWII. Through careful archival and primary source research, the project reveals some of the deeper histories, cultural context and structural conditions that undergird Coop Himmelblau’s “experimental” architecture. It argues that this work, which often incorporated medical and audiovisual technologies, should not only be understood as a call for a disciplinary expansion in the face of newly available communication and building technologies, as the argument has often been cast, but as a response to a new social, economic and bureaucratic organization of society.