architek[tour] tirol – guide to architecture in tyrol

At the time of its completion, the Hotel Maximilian indoor swimming pool was one of the rarest examples of alpine tourism architecture away from the usual clichés. The architects set a radical statement by means of a "controlled collision” with the existing building; a "glass tent” with a sophisticated tensioned roof construction, understood as being an artificial form for an artificial location. Its name, an old dialect term for disorder, was given to the swimming pool by the villagers.

This cultural centre – the name literally translates as "greenhouse” – was planted in the city centre in the 1980’s. The hermetic octagonal structure made out of dark Lecca stones was to symbolise the stubbornly provocative mind of the then young and ever-belligerent impresario. Since then, the building was enlarged and also, in a way, "opened”, by Reinhard Honold, in 2001, and has become, together with the events staged there, a well-established part of the city’s cultural life.

The railway line of the Austrian Federal Railways runs approximately parallel to the Sill on the middle of a railroad viaduct built in the mid-19th century. Bars and clubs populate the mostly converted viaduct arches which make up the Innsbruck party mile "Bögen” ("Arches”). The - meanwhile changed - jazz bar "Bogen 13”, with which Reinhardt Honold and Wolfgang Pöschl ushered in "Deconstructivism” in Tyrol in 1985, long before this was propagated as a "style”, stood at the beginning of this development. In an apparent chaos of materials and forms, elements such as lattice beams, profiles, steel mesh and corrugated sheet panels that correspond to the location are inserted; everything is raw, visually stilted and playfully staged.