Could you tell us about your early work in exhibition design as well as exhibitions of your own art? My first studies for a purposeless or—my term at the time—absolute architecture were located on the boundary between architecture and visual art or, more specifically, between architecture and sculpture. I never believed in a neat division between architecture and the other visual arts. I fleshed out my ideas in drawings and models and then won a fellowship to go to the US for two years.
HH : I started studying with Mies van der Rohe, but soon after I got there he withdrew from the IIT due to internal differences, although I continued to see him privately.
I then took urban planning classes with Hilberseimer and Peterhans. In my second year, I moved to California. But the real main purpose of my stay was to work free of constraints and really get to know America. I logged around sixty thousand miles driving around the country, with a wide variety of intentions and research foci. For example, at one point I went on a trip to visit every Vienna in the US.
I also looked at every single building by Frank Lloyd Wright. That was when I was first confronted with the reality of his designs.
Shortly before his death, he invited me to come up to Taliesin in Wisconsin for a weekend. Another subject I was interested in very early on was Native American architecture. I went to the Southwest several times to study the pueblos more closely. HH : I accumulated around two thousand slides, a pretty extensive collection.
