architek[tour] tirol – guide to architecture in tyrol

Behind Hall‘s outer city wall, Martin Scharfetter and Robert Rier created the new branch office of BTW. A stern façade grid and the dyed white cement lend the building, which is reminiscent of a villa in its type and scale, a classic impression that is broken up by the interplay of open and closed window fronts and the execution of the precast concrete components.

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.

The redevelopment and extra storey added to the office and business premises on the south side of the Sparkassenplatz form the completion of several years of redevelopment work carried out on the Tyrolean bank building enclosing this central Innsbrucker Square. With the objective of the reconstruction work and addition of a storey being the uniting as a homogeneous but not uniform new building, both on the inside and outside, various "room-identities” were placed on top of each other.

With the Hypo Tyrol Bank Headquarters on the Boznerplatz, a further regional bank has set new architectural trends in the town centre. The transparent building with its vertical slat covering matches the height of the surrounding buildings. With a slight bend at the corner it follows the course of the road and, towards the top of the building it develops into a top floor full of character with a glazed conference room.

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.

Covered by something like a crochet veil of bronze sheets, and actually rather small in comparison to the looming apartment buildings, the building of the bank’s branch office is hovering over the halfway underground customer parking lot. With a small square in front, and the drive-in telling machine, this precious little jewelery box of a bank projects a new urban quality into what before had been just another suburban block.

The Tyrol Savings and Loan headquarters in Innsbruck takes up several buildings on Erlerstraße and Sparkassenplatz. In 1994, the restructuring of the customer area, with a new entrance from the square rather than from Erlerstraße, marked the beginning of a complete re-launch of the bank’s headquarters and the square. Generally, what once had been a traditional – and somewhat stuffy - bank hall, emanating solidity and security, now is becoming an ultra-modern high-tech service zone; Wiesflecker’s customer area here was one of the first, establishing "banking by dialogue” as a ground rule, and spreading "service isles” throughout the customer area.