Wolf Prix - Between Heaven and Hell: The Architecture of Clouds

Lecture date: 1998-05-14 Wolf Prix discusses his view of the changing architecture of urban development which he compares with patches of clouds - they form and transform themselves through the complex interactions of changing situations and are symbols for conditions that change rapidly. Prix suggests that there is no fixed solution for the city - the strategies of urban planning operate on a matrix of diverging impossibilities and the architect has to simply choose one and take responsibility for it; the white noise of urban strategy is the cry of suburb and periphery which will mould and determine the image of cities and the quality they have to offer. Notions of centre, axis and spatial sequence will be replaced by tangent, vector and sequence of images and Prix would not regret the loss of public space, but reinterpret it as a fluctuating networked media event which acts more like a semi-conductor than a sequence of spaces. Wolf Prix founded Coop Himmelb(l)au with Helmut Swiczinsky in Vienna in 1968.