architek[tour] tirol – guide to architecture in tyrol

Situated at the entrance to Obergurgl, running up to the Festkogel alpine hut, – the location of the valley station was also influenced by the architects – is one of the first new generation cable lifts. To express the architectural topical excitement between technology and nature, Peter Thurner and Antonius Lanzinger developed an autonomous sculpture as a massive exposed concrete base with a glass and sheet metal roof placed on top.

The Domanig Hof farmhouse, whose core originates from the 16th century and which was used for centuries as a post station, was adapted at the end of the 1980s. It houses the community office, primary school, the local fire brigade, a library, as well as an inn. The old building stock was renovated, the roof newly constructed and extended to the east, whereby the new components clearly set themselves apart from the old structures.

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 singular building, for a very innovative light-planning company, was designed with the interplay of function and surrounding landscape as a starting point. The building lot and the road are at very much differing levels, so Lackner carved the laboratory building into the slope, topped by a cylindrically shaped staff building with an entrance at the medium level. Starting from there, two "office spirals” – every workplace at a different level, but with generous daylight – lead upwards and downwards, covering the height of two floors in either direction.

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 older house in the Abbey Garden (Stiftsgarten), built 1979-86, was a pioneer masterpiece of considerate and respectful high quality care for seniors: Very close to the town centre, resembling a small city quarter consisting of rows of buildings along a green lane. Later additions, then, were the Seidner garden house, embracing a green square open towards the south, and the atrium-type Magdalenen garden house. Together, they form an ensemble of three self-sufficient care centres, with their different typologies, materials and facades underlining the autonomy of every single building.

During the 1980s, the Hochbrixen cable car stations were the turning point of decades of Tyrolean cable car design stagnation. Committed to a constructive approach to a solution, the architects interpreted the stations as architecturally refined purpose built buildings, this without falling back on past and present day clichés.

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.

The Ursulines’ School, dating back to the Seventies, is radically different, both spacially and structurally, from any other school building in Austria. The Public School is built up in layers, as it were. The classrooms, every single one getting daylight from two sides, are situated on the top floor, the sports and leisure sections form an open central space on the ground floor as well as underground. The structure consists of one-storey-high steel frames with diagonal braces, which not only determines the way the building presents itself to view, it defines also the sequence of large-scale interior spaces allowing for manifold visual interrelations.