architek[tour] tirol – der architekturführer für tirol

On the outskirts of Weer; the new MPREIS food market with a café has created a place featuring a high quality of stay. The monolithic building opens onto the street with a transparent main façade and a terrace situated in front of the structure; the remaining façades are clad with polished stainless steel panels that reflect the surrounding fields. Artificial tree supports made of reinforced concrete and specifically set vistas shape the interior atmosphere.

The MPREIS grocery store with bistro in the tourist municipality of Ischgl toys with the clichés of traditional and alpine building. The striking design element of the façade is a dark green artificial lawn; inside, the wooden coffered ceiling, the laying pattern of the wooden floor and the furniture of the bistro cite classic elements of a farmhouse parlour.

A building from the 1960s, located between the mountain station of the Hungerburgbahn funicular railway and the valley station of the Nordkettenbahn cable railway, has been converted into a concept store with a café-bar and shop. All of the renovation measures aimed to restore the aesthetics of the 1960s and make them come alive in the interior.

A supermarket divided into several structures was converted and extended with a glass pavilion. The challenge consisted in molding the heterogeneous existing structure and the extension into a new entity, which was achieved primarily through continuous flooring featuring ornamental tiles. The tendril pattern partly turns up again on the walls and ceilings, lending the market its very unique atmosphere.

The MPREIS store on the outskirts of Patsch was realised by Volker Miklautz according to the concept of a cube stuck in the ground, which is only perceived as a line in the landscape from the adjacent field. The interior is characterised by a column-free beam roof, while organically shaped slats and a cloud of light create a very special atmosphere in the café-bistro area.

The supermarket, which is located in the immediate proximity of the municipal office and the social centre, was designed by the architects as a simple hall with a gable roof. The building thus fits as naturally as a farm or a barn into the structure of the buildings along the village road.

Past the bookshop planned by Rainer Köberl on Innsbruck’s Sparkassenplatz is "liber wiederin”, a business premises located around the corner in Erlerstraße in which Thomas Wiederin proved to be a builder with a high standard of quality. The existing shop was adapted by the architects using selected materials and colors and employs natural and artificial light that allows the books to take center stage.

In the rural context of the widely spread out community of Weerberg, an MPREIS supermarket was erected on a green meadow as a low budget project. The supermarket with a café consists of a plain structure with folded out corners that owe their effect to the raw charm of the materials used: industrial composite lumber for the roof, a steel construction braced with reinforced concrete slabs and a translucent polycarbonate that changes from smooth to gleaming, depending on the weather and light conditions, and lets the structure appear to be diversely pervious.

In a listed house going back to the Gothic period, Schlögl & Süß Architekten realized a new shop for the Swarovski Crystal Worlds. Changes were hardly made on the outside, but the inside was completely restructured and newly designed. Visitors are guided in a one-way system through a sequence of rooms staged by Swarovski in which the new interior architecture and the historic building fabric are contraposed.

In the Höttinger Au, at a heterogeneous location with a concentration of different functions which had developed coincidentally, Rainer Köberl designed an MPREIS food market. The determining element of the building is a roof projecting out to the street; all the individual function areas are arranged under it. With its café lying towards the street, the market has become a meeting point of the neighborhood.

In the past years hardly any building scheme in Innsbruck sparked such heated discussions as the various projects for the new construction of the Kaufhaus Tirol (Tyrol Department Store). David Chipperfield was ultimately commissioned to not only design the "show front” on Maria-Theresien-Straße, but also the entire department store complex. In a respectful handling of the historical substance, he placed a decidedly restrained structure into the heterogeneous street ensemble, whose elongated façade is structured by a double bend and a recessed top floor.

The supermarket in Wiesing is a further example of how MPREIS provides the residents of the surrounding villages with a communicative meeting point. The supermarket resembling a long stretched out wedge in the landscape is situated directly next to a roundabout and is accessible from the town centre via a footpath. With its Café with terrace to the west, this supermarket is both a meeting point for the locals and a resting station for tourists.

Featuring a grocery market and a Baguette Bistro, the first MPREIS shop in the Paznaun Valley was built in See. The rear of the two-story structure is dug into the slope; the building opens to a large glass front towards the street. The rough-sawn timber lattices placed in front of the glass not only filter the light, but should simultaneously symbolize the building's steadfastness in the face of the threatening danger from the avalanche line lying opposite.

Similar to the Innsbruck main railway station, the architects were presented with the challenge of adapting a representative branch of the Tyrolean MPREIS chain to fit into a cellar without daylight. Here, such as at the railway station, a ceiling of mirrors removes the room’s boundaries thereby highlighting the goods. Untreated wooden floor, white "islands of distinctiveness” and heavy round pillars, which due to the mirrors appear as tall light-pillars in a mighty hall, all influence this new "flagship store” situated in the Kaufhaus TYROL.

Across the street from the central station and bus station, an old MPreis branch was expanded and re-shaped to become an appropriately urbane corner of this busy square, with a café and restaurant at street level. The existing building structure, reduced to its barest essentials by all kinds of miracles of stress analysis, is the spectacular eye-catcher in an otherwise rather heterogeneous mass of buildings, together with the green wavy ceiling.

Erected in the late 1980s by ATP on the grounds of the former Rhomberg textile factory, "Sillpark” is Innsbruck’s largest inner city shopping center. The expansion, which resulted from a competition, supplements the postmodern stock with a four-story, monolithic annex and a newly designed plaza space facing the inner city. In the building’s interior, an inner space opened over two stories is traversed by a roof made of partially printed, partially satined glass that brings a rich variety of true light into the mall.

The entrance and the shop rooms of an old building, which comes under the federal law on the protection of monuments, had to be adapted to house an optician’s shop. The long main room, with a baroque vault, was returned, as far as possible, to its original state. A sculptural piece of furniture with a tapestry of red felt, and a working table covered by green rubber stand free of the walls to counterpoint the historical brickwork.

At a slight distance from the Reschenpass-Straße, the MPREIS supermarket curves along the gentle back of a slope towards the Schloßberg. The inside offers a high two-part illuminated main room with a visible wooden construction area for the shelves for goods. For the daylight sensitive fresh goods, a low, closed, element as an introverted backbone embedded in the slope.

The tree trunks surrounding the cubic glass building are the characteristic feature of this supermarket. The untreated spruce trunks stripped of their bark have been placed at irregular intervals forming a homogeneous construction. They also provide a functional filter in front of the roof-high fixed glazing, define protected outside-areas and spaces in between and, allow interesting "light and shadow shows” to take place inside the building.

The bookstore on Sparkassenplatz, by Rainer Köberl, is a "black box” for books. Through two big store windows one can look into the store. Before and behind the windows there is a lot of space for books to be presented. The floor, the walls, the ceiling and the furniture – everything is black, so everybody’s attention will be focussed on the true stars of the production: the books.

Amidst architecturally heterogeneous buildings, the Isser optician’s shop creates a space for the eyes to rest. Almost unimpaired, passers-by can look into the show and sales area and concentrate on the goods presented there, since the purist design refrains from distracting their attention.

The individual stores of the MPreis food chain, which was the first to use high quality architecture to express its corporate identity, are designed by ever varying architects to precisely fit into or react to a specific context. This one, situated on the lower level of the Central Station, without daylight, is a "glittering cave”. Black glass panels form the ceiling and mirror the goods staged on brightly lit shelves and the customers, thus creating a theatre of goods that refuses to be imprisoned by well-defined limits of space.

The cubic structure, and its translucent skin – an alien here – provoked controversial discussions. This 21st century building asserts itself, un-self-consciously, against the adjacent baroque Taxis palace, the Servites’ Church across the street, and the square in front of the seat of the regional government behind. And still it sensitively fits into the urban tissue, respecting proportions and historical axes and throughways.

Resulting from the grounds available and the town planning situation, the Kirchbichl MPREIS was constructed as an organic sweeping building. The mainly closed construction is illuminated indirectly from above; only the baguette-café enjoys an all-round open view. On the inside the curves influence the visible concrete shell; a suspended birch plywood ceiling the rooms atmosphere.

The MPREIS supermarket is situated 3 m below road level, all one sees, when looking from the village center, is a hovering roof, because the mass of the market building and entrance area is nestling against a slight turn of the road. A café, a terrace and a children’s playground, and additional spaces for various other shops make sure this supermarket serves as a village meeting point where people can do more than just their everyday shopping.

Dominique Perrault was the first architect not resident in Tyrol to be entrusted with the setting up of, in the meantime, three supermarkets by MPREIS, two in Wattens and one in Zirl. The SuperM on the main road to Wattens is situated in the middle of a heterogeneous built-up-area. Perrault reacted to this with a materiality and constructively light and open building with a yard type recess, which together with the small protruding square, forms an urban centre.

At the east border of Wörgl in an almost American "strip-situation” is one of Tyrol’s largest MPREIS supermarkets. In the heterogeneous (still growing) development area, Pöschl placed a bridge type building on five cylinders at right angles to the road. On the west side of the building a concave screen shade reaches out from the protruding roof across almost the complete height of the building. The space in between provides room for the fitness centre on the top floor.

A large supermarket with sufficient parking space had to be situated on a relatively cramped lot in the middle of the urban fabric. Wolfgang Pöschl and Josef Bleser reacted to the difficult requirements by letting the slightly slanting sales area float above the parking level recessed halfway into the terrain and to bring the mountains as well as the riverbank landscape closer to the customer by means of subtly placed openings. Integrated in the market is a café, which has taken over an important communicative and social function as a type of neighborhood center.

A new type of supermarket was developed for two promoters, Jenbacher Werke (canteen) and MPREIS (supermarket): With the historic fish market in Venice as an example, a new type of roofed market under a large elevated building, in which the canteen for 300 persons, a casino, a kitchen, a works doctor and a large south terrace for the Jenbacher Werke are accommodated.

Dominique Perrault set up his first MPREIS opposite Swarovski Kristallwelten, which was designed by André Heller – a solitary building based on minimalism with an opaque shimmering glass façade. A biomorphic scaffolding surrounding nine pines permeates the rectangular building allowing the border between the inside and outside to merge where visible truss-girders, OSB boards and black floor slabs create a market hall atmosphere.