Le Season’s Book 2013/14 de l’Opera de Graz s’appuie et détourne la volonté initiale de ses architectes Fellner & Helmer : respecter vigoureusement la symétrie dans ce lieu de culture. Un livret visuellement intéressant, jouant sur les effets kaléidoscopiques pensé par Moodley Brand Identity.
Construit en 2003 dans la ville de Graz en Autriche lorsque la ville était capitale européenne de la culture, ce musée des arts insolite appelé Kunsthaus Graz est aussi surnommé Friendly Alien par ses auteurs Peter Cook et Colin Fournier. Davantage d’images de ce lieu surprenant sont à découvrir dans la suite.
Overlapping walls of curving concrete encase this funeral chapel in Graz by Austrian architects Hofrichter-Ritter.
The three walls never meet, but are connected to one another by panels of glazing that denote entrances at the front and back.
The chapel of rest is at the centre of the building and can seat up to 100 guests at a time, although the glazed facade can also be opened up to accomodate larger parties.
The middle concrete wall curls around the end of this hall to screen views out the cemetery beyond.
Ancillary rooms are wrapped around the eastern side of the building.
We’ve featured a few concrete church buildings in recent months, including one lined with crushed volcanic rocks. See all our stories about buildings for worship here.
Photography is by Karl-Heinz Putz.
Here’s a project description from Hofrichter-Ritter Architekten:
“Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46)
The chapel of rest for the Steinfeld cemetery is designed in the form of two curving formwork elements made of reinforced concrete and appearing as two carefully receptive hands. It is the centrepiece of the redesigned Cemetery Centre which was begun by the municipal parish of Graz under episcopal vicar Dr Heinrich Schnuderl, continued by Christian Leibnitz, the new municipal parish provost, and finally built to a design by Hofrichter-Ritter Architects in 2011.
From the perspective of urban development the building site had become a peripheral location due to the construction of the new, exclusively pedestrian tunnel underneath the railway line. Upgrading the site and, as a result, the Steinfeld cemetery was a matter of importance for Graz’s urban planners. Consequently, the cemetery has regained its significance as a public space and park.
A new concept for taking final leave of deceased loved ones has been developed in dignified and pleasant surroundings:
1. The chapel of rest serves as a chapel of rest and place of final blessing in one.
2. After the farewell ceremony the deceased is accompanied in a funeral procession through a separate entrance out of the building to the burial ground.
3. Due to increased demand on the part of the bereaved members of the family, technical multimedia facilities enable the farewell ceremony to be arranged in a highly individual way, if so required.
Depending on the particular choice of seating arrangement, the chapel of rest can accommodate up to about 100 people. In special cases larger funerals can also be held by opening up the northern glass wall and by using the spacious dimensions of the open forecourt. Cultural events may also take place at this site. Vital ancillary and service rooms have been positioned in the eastern part of the hall to facilitate smooth operations at the cemetery. These rooms are encompassed by a wall which runs along the length of the road and also acts as a necessary noise barrier to the Südbahn railway line. To the south, the wall goes on to define a green area with a columbarium grove and wall and with urn graves. Amenities such as a florist, stonemason, phone box and a public toilet are also situated right at the forecourt.
The chapel of rest:
The area for the farewell ceremony is regarded as the key space: the central location, size and above all the height of the room makes it the heart of the service centre. This space is used in three phases. These can be staged differently, depending on how the room has been arranged, especially with regard to the openings and lighting effects. The sequence is as follows: laying out – farewell – accompaniment of the deceased to the burial ground. An approx. 150 m² chapel of rest, surrounded by two shell-like walls (see ground plan) with a ceiling height of about 4.80-5.0 m, forms the main structural element of the building. An overlap between the two shells hides the view of the exit to the columbarium grove and cemetery grounds.
Ancillary rooms:
The ancillary rooms used for running all of the cemetery’s operations and arranging funerals are joined to one side of the chapel of rest. They consist of the rooms required for the funeral (lounge, preparation, work room, store room and frigidarium), for the priest and for the cemetery’s administrative staff. These rooms cover a total area of about 120 m². The outer wall of the ancillary rooms described above is formed by the “new cemetery wall”.
Cemetery wall:
The intention is to build a new cemetery wall flanking the ancillary rooms and the new columbarium grove. Much of it will form the outer wall of the ancillary rooms. Made of white concrete, this wall features different slants: where it performs a space-enclosing function, the wall slants towards the building; where it has the sole function of a “boundary wall” it slants away from the site (cf. photo of model). A second, relatively small structure has also been included in the overall design; it accommodates two small business premises and a public toilet.
Time sequence:
Start of planning: May/June 2010
Completion period: November 2010 – November 2011
Layout review:
Chapel of rest: approx. 150 m²
Ancillary rooms: approx. 120 m²
Sheltered area at the front: approx. 40 m²
Length of the new cemetery wall: approx. 75 m² (height varies from approx. 2.00 to 3.50 m)
Columbarium grove / park-like area: approx. 550 m²
Paved forecourt: approx. 500 m²
Cavernous holes in the courtyard of three museum buildings in Graz, Austria, lead underground into a new, shared entrance by Spanish architects Nieto Sobejano and local firm eep architekten (photographs by Roland Halbe).
The extension adds a conference hall, reading areas and an archive to the Joanneum Museum complex, which comprises a regional library, an art gallery and a natural history museum.
Glass surrounds the conical openings and each one tunnels down through one or two storeys to bring diffused natural light into the underground rooms.
Visitors enter the building via an outdoor elevator into the largest cone.
Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos have completed a few museums this year – see them all here, including another one that tunnels underground.
Here’s some further explanation from Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos:
Joanneum Museum extension and refurbishment
International Competition 1st Prize 2006
Surface and Depth
The ground surface, the horizontal platform upon which most of our movements in the city occur, is very rarely the generating argument or the spatial support of a project. Perhaps as a result of that yearn for an identity that every new intervention seems to demand, architecture has tended to express itself throughout history by means of objects, volumes that have often established a difficult relationship with the scale of the urban environment in which they were inserted. In contrast, the extension of the Joanneum Museum emerged from the intention of acting within the strict limits of the horizontal plane of the city, offering a new public space based on an architectural proposal that is paradoxically simple in its depth and complex in its surface.
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The Joanneumsviertel of Graz is formed of three buildings of different periods and uses that up to now gave their back to one another and towards a residual rear courtyard: the Museum of Natural History – from the 18th century –, the Regional Library of Styria and New Gallery of Contemporary Art, the latter built at the end of the 19th century. As organisms belonging to the same institution, the project set out the need to endow the complex with a common access, welcoming spaces, conference hall, reading areas and services, aside from a lower level for archives and storage. Instead of falling into the temptation of developing an iconic intervention, as has often happened in recent extensions of existing museums, the project meant, however, a unique opportunity to carry out an at once urban and architectural transformation.
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If the historic center of Graz is known for its expressive roofscape, our proposal develops entirely below ground: we simply define a new pavement that as a large carpet takes up the whole exterior space between buildings and conceals below ground the spaces that house the required program. This decision allows acknowledging the value of the existing historical constructions – carrying out a refurbishment that is respectful towards their architectural characteristics – which acts only punctually in some interior areas without affecting the original exterior image and volume. The horizontal continuous surface of the new square is marked by a combinatorial series of circular patios that bring natural light into the underground spaces and house the entrance, the lobby and shared areas of museums and library, a gathering place from which to reach each one of them.
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The geometric abstraction implicit in every architectural work appears in the proposal with the boldness of a contemporary installation in the public space, transformed into an apparently random sequence of conical intersections derived from a single, virtual three-dimensional figure. Curved glass surfaces with a continuous silkscreen print filter light towards the interior and, inversely, illuminate the square with artificial light at night. A cultural institution like the Joanneum Museum, on which the Kunsthaus Graz is dependent, thus expresses the changing relationship between art and city.
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The square that centralizes the access to the museums is an unusual intervention in the urban space: a bet on the common action between plastic arts and architecture that will incorporate specific installations in collaboration with contemporary artists. The new extension goes almost unnoticed, concealed beneath the pavement that connects the historical buildings, as a materialization of a perforated horizon that expresses, and not only literally, that the depth of an architectural work can reside, unexpectedly, on its surface.
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Location: Graz (Austria)
Client: Government of Steiermark (Austria)
Architects: Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos, eep architekten
Project: Fuensanta Nieto, Enrique Sobejano, Gerhard Eder
Collaborators: Dirk Landt, Christian Egger,Bernd Priesching, Daniel Schilp, Michele Görhardt, Udo Brunner, Anja Stachelscheid, Sebastián Sasse, Nik Wenzke, Ana-Maria Osorio, Michael Fenske
Structure: zt-büro dipl.-ing. Petschnigg
Mechanical Engineers: Pechmann GmbH, Ingenieurbüro f. Haustechnik
Models: Juan de Dios Hernández – Jesús Rey
Project: 2007-2008
Construction: 2009-2011
Austrian firm GS Architects have completed this black cantilevered office building in Graz, Austria.
Called MP09 Black Panther, the building was designed as the headquarters for a company specialising in jewellery and spectacles, and includes a hotel, rentable office space, a shop and restaurant.
The building is clad in black tiles and juts out over its concrete base, housing an open-air terrace in the end of the cantilever.
Photographs are by Gerald Liebminger.
The information that follows is from the architects:
An architectonic punctuation at an exposed site of the city – a new and distinctive Entree to the city – a future oriented potential for development for the whole area.
Putting a company into the spotlight means transforming a philosophy into architecture. The’black panther’s does not only recount the story of the company but he emotionalises, he describes a vision and makes it physically and sculpturally ascertainable.
Where Design and shape evolve, ideas emerge and become manifest in mass. Elegant and smooth, the ‘black Panther’s composes eagerness and speed to the urban architecture. His watchful eyes attend the street – movement and silhouette merge in the dance of the forces and the night.
The office-building MP09, named after the owner of the firm, Michael Pachleitner, also called Black Panther, was intended as a landmark to the city-entrance of Graz.
In 2006 the Pachleitner Group, which specialises in the design and marketing of spectacles and jewellery and Wegraz, (Graz-based company for urban renewal and refurbishment), set up competitions for an office and hotel building, as well as a headquarters building with a wing to be rented out, a flagship store and restaurant. Both projects established 2006 at a 2-stage competition among 9 offices decided unanimously by the jury.
During the competition phase the client offices photographs of airplanes, ships and cars that expressed the feeling he wanted the building to convey. We derived from them the guiding idea of a crouching black panther, poised ready to spring, which provided a metaphor that accurately describes both building parts and which committed them to a goal: to create an appearance that would be both powerful and elegant. The detail planning for the project, and the scheduled completion date was started immediately afterwards.
Construction of the 32-million euro project began in summer 2007, it was completed in May 2010: a free-standing building in a setting defined in very diverse ways by the UPC arena, ice sports stadium, Murpark, housing blocks and single-family houses.
It is located directly on the Liebenau ring-road, which has a high volume of traffic and is a source of emissions, on an approximately triangular-shaped site that originally sloped to the southwest. The main part of this provocatively conspicuous office building contains the headquarters of a local company designing eyeglasses and jewellery and distributing them worldwide.
Its a hard shaped sculpture covered with a black glass facade erected over a concrete base develops from a compact tail to a more and more resolving head cantelevering towards the city. The different directions of the building structure are retrieved in the inside structure of the spaces.
From almost every position there are vistas through the whole building to the outdoor spaces. A special quality of the building evolves out of the individually designed technical solutions concerning the facade, partition walls, doors, staircases and many other components.
Accurate details and few colors in various surfaces and materials define the interior. Even the whole furniture was custom-made by the architects and is consequently congruent to the architecture.
The desired expression of concentrated tension and dynamism, amplified by long window strips, suits the company’s philosophy that enabled a small family business from the post-war years to develop into a company of global reach.
Philosophy GSarchitects
Without art, the human soul which sets us apart from other beings, would starve. art is the mental food for our soul. what makes art outstanding is its demand on sensibility. required not only of the artists but, also of those, who interact with it. the heart of an architectural project is the content, the idea. art gives the project the body, thoughts that are free to reach unforeseen dimensions. we accept the rules, norms and requirements for utility that are the framework of architecture. however, the ideas and their evolution are exciting adventures with each new project.
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The beginning is always a sketch. the sketch as three-dimensional model of thoughts is the beginning and the collection of thoughts and feelings. she tells us everything we are looking for and accompanies the project throughout like a red thread. The shape and the details are eternally changeable, but the content, the idea which is behind, is the unchangeable in architecture. that’s the way we understand it.
That’s why for us its important to have partners who develop these ideas together with us to realise them in this mind.
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| L40 by Roger Bundschuh and Cosima von Bonin | Mountains and Opening House by EASTERN Design Office | Parabola House by Atelier Tekuto |
Austrian architects Sandra Janser and Elisabeth Koller have painted streets in Graz, Austria to resemble a running track as part of a regeneration project
Called Ready. Steady. Go!, the 750m-long installation on the Jakoministraße and Klosterwiesgasse aims to attract visitors to the area.
The red strip measures at 750 metres and covers the road and pavements, with grey lines dividing it into lanes.
The installation was completed for Design Month Graz 2010 and won the first prize in a design competition.
Here’s a bit more information about the project:
In the course of Design Month Graz 2010 the project „Ready. Steady. Go!“ by architects Sandra Janser and Elisabeth Koller won the first prize in the design competition for the installation of a visual frame in the Jakomini district. The intention of this visual frame is to define the streets Jakoministraße and Klosterwiesgasse in order to mark them as a significant design area with a visible and positive identity. The entrance to the Jakomini district is clearly recognized by the north and south street endings. The streets themselves are revamped leaving them with a fresh inviting look for visitors to explore.
The running track as presented in the project „Ready. Steady. Go!“ was applied in September 2010. It attracts attention to the changes in the quarter and will make people stop and absorb the newly created atmosphere. A total of 750 meters or 4600 square meters along the streets and pavements around the block are coloured in red, the lines separating the tracks are grey.
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| CDSea by Bruce Munro | The Longest Bench by Studio Weave | More installations on Dezeen |
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