Haus-Rucker-Co’s Mind-Bending Spatial Contraptions
This is the Environment Transformer, an appliance created in 1968 by Austrian art/architecture collective Haus-Rucker-Co. I find myself incredibly drawn to this image because it reminds me of the sci-fi tech I saw in Soviet movies as I was growing up. The device is part of a series called Splendid Blend, which also included the Mind Expander, the Ideal Museum, and many other conceptual projects that demonstrate the group’s utopian outlook on living space and technology. I want one!
Although the Haus-Rucker establishment is long gone, an elegant website exists to catalogue all their creations that never got built, and some that did.
Top Row: Mind Expander and Yellow Heart
May 23rd, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Everything about this screams 1968. The bubble domed acrylic and the aluminum collars look like what a blind man would sculpt after having Sputnik described to them. It’s almost totemic of the Space Age.
May 24th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
UBER.
May 24th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
Love the buildings. (I am at the moment slogging through the terminal studio of my Masters program. It’s nice to see life after this, because I certainly can’t conceive of it on my own.)
August 31st, 2008 at 5:19 am
There are several pieces by these guys in the MOMA right now. It was a pleasant surprise. (in wunderkammer, and the architecture room).
August 19th, 2010 at 9:40 am
I’m quite impressed with the work herein. quite the style.