architek[tour] tirol – guide to architecture in tyrol

Der in der historisch gewachsenen, dichten Bebauung der Höttinger Gasse liegende Baukörper ist aus einem geladenen Architekturwettbewerb hervorgegangen. Direkt entlang der Gasse positioniert, schützt der in Anlehnung an die Farbigkeit der historischen Stadt in rotem Beton ausgeführte Wohnbau den dahinterliegenden Hof vor Schall und Einsicht und erinnert durch die vorspringende Gewerbeeinheit an das kleine, abgebrochene Geschäftslokal.

Aufgrund der historischen Bedeutung der Innbrücke, die 1982 an der Stelle der ersten und namensgebenden Brücke errichtet wurde, entschied die Stadt Innsbruck, die Generalsanierung von einem Architekten begleiten zu lassen. Mit wenigen gestalterischen Maßnahmen gelang es, das Verkehrsbauwerk in einen einladenden öffentlichen Raum zu verwandeln. So wurden alle nicht notwendigen Mauern entfernt und durch ein räumlich geflochtenes Geländer ersetzt, die Anbindung der Brückenköpfe gestalterisch adaptiert und eine neue Beleuchtung realisiert.

In a 17 m2-large shop, Rainer Köberl set up a Nepalese take-away for Dil Ghamal – a building owner for whom the architect had already planned the "Sensei” and "Meer Sensei” sushi bars. The space is kept in the basic silver color. Its dark walnut, mirror and a Sanskrit proverb on the wall exude a touch of Nepal.

Designed by Rainer Köberl and Daniela Kröss, the museum building lies like a small fortress on a steep slope. Rising above a roughly pentagonal layout is a tower-like structure that gets its conciseness from the clear form and the reduction of the design elements to reddish-colored concrete in connection with bold red steel elements. From the entrance on the ground floor, visitors are guided through two exhibition levels up to a viewing terrace, which leads over a footbridge into the ibex enclosure.

The "Stuemergründe” village center, designed by Rainer Köberl and Daniela Kröss, emerged as the winning project of a novel competition procedure with the intensive involvement of the residents of Fließ. Their project breaks up the complex spatial allocation plan—from the village hall, to a doctor’s office and commercial space, right up to apartments—into three different structures. Developed in reference to the small-scaled village structure, the buildings are arranged on the building lot in such a manner that attractive square sequences and vistas were created.

A two-story restaurant space created in the 1980s was adapted for a new tenant. Due to the limited financial possibilities, many elements of the interior design (gray tile floors, suspended plasterboard ceilings) had to be retained. The design approach developed out of this pragmatism painted all the surfaces gray and set vibrant colored accents with the furnishings.

In the center of Kufstein, the City Hall and the neighboring "Bildsteinhaus” were transformed into a new, multi-functional unit for the city administration. The historic ensemble was interwoven with consciously placed interventions into a complex whole. The uncovered city wall builds the foundation; a white "crown” on the roof completes the ensemble.

The branch office of the BTV bank occupies a small lot at the beginning of Mitterweg, a street with a very heterogeneous development structure. In reaction to this rather dreary area, it was important for Rainer Köberl to create a friendly antithesis. The building is characterized by the distinctive shape of a truncated pyramid pulled upwards and in the tension between openness and closure, resp., lightness and heaviness of the designed façade.

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.

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.

A former office on the first floor of a house, again listed under the federal law on the protection of monuments, was turned into a restaurant where one can take part, as it were, in the visual and acoustic drama that is happening in the street, and then switch effortlessly to concentrating on the works of art provided by the kitchen. The wide oriel window in front is as much part of the street’s public space as it works as a theatre box to look out from within, from an interior space characterised by black panels and various kinds of dark wood.

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 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 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.

A very urbane, if not metropolitan café in a 15th century building listed as a monument? Yes, that is what the "Manna" is. The narrow room, partly stretching over two storeys, is virtually subdivided by a rather complex spatial organisation, the materials – predominantly oak and black glass – contrast the historical substance.

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.