Text in English & German. Johannes Peter Hoelzinger studied architecture at the Stadelschule in Frankfurt am Main from 1954 to 1957. After a residency fellowship at the Deutsche Akademie Villa Massimo in Rome he founded a "planning association for new forms of the environment" in 1965 together with Zero artist Hermann Goepfert, who has since died. One of the most successful results of his work with Goepfert was a new design for the Schlosspark in Karlsruhe on the occasion of the Bundesgartenschau in 1967, which won a major German architectural prize, the Hugo-Haring-Preis. From 1991 until his retirement in 2002 Hoelzinger directed the art and public-space course at the Akademie der bildenden Kunste in Nuremberg. Individualistic and oppositional in comparison to other post-World War II architectural achievements, the design of Hoelzinger's buildings is very distinctive. The playful elements of Postmodernism are as alien to his work as the functionalism of New Building. Because of his association with Hermann Goepfert, Hoelzinger is much more closely connected with the art scene of his time. The integration of art and architecture is a unique feature of his buildings. If we try to assign a category to this "object architecture" (a term he coined himself), we will find less overlap with architecture than with fine art. From the very beginning Hoelzinger saw architecture as an artistic discipline. Light kinetics offered him important new perspectives. Lighting design and the resulting colour changes of white walls play a vital role in his work.

Text in English and German. In the summer 1978, the cover of the magazine Bauwelt showed a photograph of an unusual building. It was tersely introduced to readers as a 'private house with office in Bad Nauheim', but it was immediately obvious that this was a built manifesto. What appeared was a strictly symmetrically articulated, steeply rising facade, emanating dignity and composure. It also seemed able to manage without windows, which further enhanced its austere elegance. And then there were the strikingly slender, sharp-angled wall elements, which seemed captivatingly graceful, or even delicate and fragile -- as though folded from paper. The fact is that, long before Gilles Deleuze had cast his spell on a new generation of aesthetically ambitious architects, Johannes Peter Hoelzinger was putting his folding skills into practice as a matter of course.