Out of the Clouds

Building from the drawing board

Architecture and freehand drawing are inextricably linked. Even in the Gothic period, the principle applied: what you can't build, you at least draw. The same applies to the sketches of Wolf dPrix, co-founder and CEO of Coop Himmelb(l)au. Over the 53 years of their creation, Prix’s sketches formed the first stage of every design – despite rapid developments in digital architecture. Whereas his freehand drawings were proxies for completed projects in the 1960s and 1970s, today they serve as strategic guides to the firm’s complex buildings. From 2,800 archival drawings, 1,300 examples were selected for publication to represent developmental dynamics in an archive-like format. As invaluable documents of architectural history, they illustrate some 320 selected projects.

• Freehand drawing as a central medium of Wolf dPrix
• 1,300 sketches from 320 projects spanning over 50 years
• With a foreword by Thom Mayne (Morphosis), a conversation between Kristin Feireiss and Wolf dPrix, and an essay by Günther Feuerstein

Wolf dPrix, co-founder of the cooperative architectural design firm Coop Himmelb(l)au, Vienna