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Co-op Himmelblau.
Austrian architectural and design partnership founded in 1968 by Wolf D. Prix, Helmut Swiczinsky and Rainer Michael Holzer. Holzer resigned in 1971, and the continuing members, who had both qualified at the Technische Universiteit, Vienna, set out to incorporate into their architecture the quality of fantasy. Although they initially professed a commitment to technological innovation, they later reacted against the constraints of modern urban design and came to be associated, somewhat misleadingly, with the movement towards deconstruction in architecture. Their early experiments were in the field of conceptual architecture and included the Roter Angel Bar (1981) at Rabensteig, Vienna, which specifically denied space and time as accessible conventions. Here the theories of Gunther Domenig about spatial flexibility in building were an undoubted influence. During the 1980s Co-op Himmelblau opposed the historicizing pastiche, as they saw it, of Post-modernism. Constructive form was used manifestly to imply an historical attitude to the future, for example the roof-top remodelling at Falkestrasse 6, Vienna, where an abstracted, birdlike superstructure poised at roof level contrasts with the predominant 19th-century cupolas of the district. In the design for the Funder Factory 3 (1988) at St Veit an der Glan, Austria, the rectangular form conventionally used for industrial architecture is radically reworked and ‘dematerialized’ to provide space for conference rooms and main entrance portal.
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