architek[tour] tirol – guide to architecture in tyrol

This part of the former Adambräu brewery, a landmark industrial building of classical modernism by Lois Welzenbacher, came under the federal law on the protection of monuments when the brewery closed down. Most respectful, nearly invisible interventions turned the functionalist structure into what might be described as a pulsating machine to convey architecture. On the lower floors,aut. architektur und tirol continually proposes exhibitions and lectures on contemporary architecture, the upper floors are occupied by the University Architecture Archive.

The new Bergisel ski jump is a landmark that is visible from most every part of town. The various functional elements, while still perfectly and precisely serving their purpose as mere instruments of sports competition, were moulded into an elegantly sculptural and expressively dynamic construction symbolising the ski jumper’s movement.

For the Amsterdam UN Studio (Ben van Berkel and Caroline Boss), this was the first international competition they won. The sculpturally carved building boasts an outer skin of black basalt, rising out of an environment of blackened concrete. The interior is, of course, not open to the public, it hosts the transformers and the control centre that are part of the essential infrastructure of the city.

The BTV City Forum, right in the centre of the city core, is the bank’s new company headquarter, containing offices, an ample customers’ centre, an event hall and rooms for contemporary art and photography expositions. The sculptural building complex fits in well with the pre-existing Gruenderzeit block structure, the corner being marked by a striking tower. The core of the building is the grand soaring hall.

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.

What formerly used to be just a parking lot in the back of the old City Hall now has become an exciting mix of heterogeneous functions: city administration, city council, shopping mall, a hotel and various restaurants and cafés. Intelligently graded heights, a glass roof for the mall, plus a central "Campanile” – these are the main characteristics of an unpretentious and still very outspoken ensemble that easily and fluently manages to integrate the pre-existing older buildings and to connect to the cityscape around it.

Innsbruck’s "House of Music” can be found at one the most central locations in the inner city, where the city concert halls and chamber theater housed in the previous building were combined with numerous institutions dedicated to music. The complex spatial program is accommodated in a compact structure with a multilayered façade made of ceramic cladding. Emerging as independent elements, the publicly accessible hall bodies clearly distinguish themselves from those areas used for research, teaching and administration.

The new Social Sciences and Economics building is a most important urban joint between the Old Town and the historical park of the Imperial Garden, widely commended not only as a great work of architecture, but as an achievement in urban development. Formerly, the massive military barracks had virtually occupied all the available space, tightly closing itself off from the street, now there is a vital public space, a truly "open university” in the heart of the city centre.

After the Bergisel ski jump, the four station buildings and the oblique suspension bridge across the river make up the second project Zaha Hadid realised in Innsbruck. Starting from the fundamental concept of a shell and the shadow thrown by it, she designed an organically shaped glass shell over a concrete landscape, the translucent roof spreading and extending, as it were, the stations’ spaces, thus staging a drama of movement adapted to the particular character of each location.

The stations originally designed in the late 1920s by Franz Baumann certainly are some of the most important monuments of modernism in Tyrol. In the course of a technological upgrade of the cable railway, the stations had inevitably to be adapted both functionally and spatially. All the necessary interventions, however, were developed strictly along the lines of either severely restoring the original building as designed by Baumann, thus cancelling all later additions, or ostentatiously showing contemporary additions to be just that: changes added because they were necessary.

As the end result of an invited architecture competition, the multi-functional P2 building connects private and public interests as an urban hybrid. The pointed, almost 50-meter-high tower contains apartments, and the two-story base building provides space for the Innsbruck City Library, which features several reading zones and an event hall. In between, there is a public space designed as a reading deck, accessible via two flights of stairs, which invites visitors to linger without any pressure to consume.