architek[tour] tirol – guide to architecture in tyrol

The formerly commercial cinema, designed by Hubert Prachensky in the 1950’s, was cautiously adapted to house an art film society. The new steeply rising auditorium guarantees good view from every seat and, at the same time, makes room for a second, smaller auditorium situated crossways under the bigger one. The lounge bar serves as a meeting point not only for movie addicts.

The State Hospital and University Clinics, on the western fringe of the city centre – originally built towards the end of the 19th century on what was then an empty lot on the outskirts of town – is a "city within the city”. The medical centre on Anichstraße replaced the former gynaecological and ophthalmic wards, the architects organized 40.000 cubic meters in six storeys, around two spacious interior courtyards, so as to give a new spatial order to what was a rather heterogeneous neighbourhood. The intuitively self-explanatory organization of the various units manages to create an air of cosy and calm "wellness”, closer to a hotel than to traditional technology-ridden medical treatment.

In place of the original town planned, unsatisfying and unused rest room running along the street, the new library building creates a flowing crossover from urban space to the university campus. The library is situated beneath the existing buildings and connected to the reorganised main library. The library’s roof provides much-used open space and serves as a new university town-side entrance.

The combined children’s and cardiac care center (KHZ) – an elongated block that takes up the edges of the existing buildings – arose in two construction phases. The KHZ Ost (Nickl & Partner) was realized in 2008 in the form of a three-story addition and a six-story new building with a multi-layer façade made of folding lamellas. The connected KHZ West (Architekturhalle Wulz-König), with its formally similar but reworked building shell, was completed in 2015.

The University of Innsbruck’s childcare facility was designed, planned and built by students from the architecture faculty as part of a bachelor thesis. Clad with wooden slats reminiscent of a bird’s nest, the structure opens up towards the Inn River through floor-to-ceiling glass fronts. On the inside, floors and walls form a flowing continuum of spaces with different atmospheres and usage possibilities.

A new building emerged at the western end of the university campus for the autonomous Institutes for Chemistry/Pharmacy and Theoretical Medicine. Based on the highly complex requirements for research and teaching, on one hand, and the growing urban structure, on the other hand, the Architekturwerkstatt din a4 developed a compact structure with functional- and design-related courtyards, indentures and recesses.

The Innsbruck location of the AZW Training Center is situated in one of the "Huter Houses”, a building complex erected at the beginning of the 1970s. In the course of the spatial expansion that became necessary, the stock was reorganized around an infrastructural core and enhanced by a second upper story. By relocating the main entrance, the previously unsatisfactory, backstreet-like entryway was significantly improved and a permeable and open communication zone was created.

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.

In the course of renovation, both of the faculty buildings erected at the end of the 1960s in a very similar form by Hubert Prachensky and Ernst Heiß were differently designed according to their respective uses. The building for the construction engineers now shows itself as a tower with a clear and closed façade. By contrast, the architecture building received a skin made out of variously tilted glass wings that lend the structure vibrancy and lets the house appear open.

This new quarter is the westernmost part of the city, closing off the residential area towards a zone reserved for agricultural use. With over 300 apartments, at the time it was built it was Austria’s largest low-energy housing project. The master plan was designed by the Vorarlberg architects Carlo Baumschlager and Dietmar Eberle; it consists of six very compact single buildings staggered, as it were, on a chessboard, creating a multitude of views and perspectives into the surrounding landscape that defy the high density.

As a further development of the "Am Lohbach I” project completed in 2000, the Innsbruck Stadtbau GmbH constructed a further five residential buildings. Based on the original town planning concept, Baumschlager & Eberle and driendl*architects realised the two or rather three chessboard type blocks of flats, which although next to each other are slightly offset. Generous, light-flooded development zones characterise the inside of the buildings.

The last building to be built for the "Am Lohbach” residential development project was the residential and nursing home for seniors designed by Bernhard and Stefan Marte as an atrium house. An open light-flooded building with nursing rooms on the upper storeys organised as residential groups. To the east of the home is a district square with a café for the residents; the café is also open to the general public.

The new day care center for the growing district of Kranebitten was built on a part of the spacious forest playground. Since a flat, L-shaped structure, together with two terraced wings, encloses a large inner courtyard, the children are provided with the necessary free space directly "in the house” – an additional play area in the public realm was not needed.

MED-EL, the world leading producer of cochlear implant systems, has its headquarters in Innsbruck. The five-story annex building for research and development contains conference rooms, training and measuring labs, clean rooms and offices on more than 13,000 m2. The core theme for the architectonic implementation was, on the one hand, to create an appropriate space offer for the communication culture lived within the company and, on the other hand, to formally express the firm’s innovative technical direction.

In the west of Innsbruck a new building was constructed as a public private partnership, whereby a shopping centre and a school, facilities with completely different forms of use, have been accommodated. In a clearly defined building, which provides the surrounding urban area – including an industrial estate and heterogeneous structured residential developments – with a new identity, the two users each have their own, developed for their individual requirements, completely separate areas.

Like many other schools, the HTL Bau und Design (Technical High School for Structural and Civil Engineering and Design) is affected by an acute shortage of space. ao-architekten realized the desired extension as a compact, single-story addition to the main wing, which clearly stands out from the existing structure through a band of windows running around the entire story. In the building, which is characterized by an open spatial structure and supplied with northern light via sheds, a studio-like ambiance with a high quality of stay was created for the seven final-year classes.

A housing development with approximately 100 apartments was erected in the densely built-up residential area where a gas station once stood. It exemplarily shows how postwar modernism can be densified in urban structures without perpetuating its monotony and uniformity. Several elongated components of various heights were placed on the narrow plot, creating an exciting ensemble with a clear center.

In response to the town planning situation in the vicinity of the square shaped church from Horst Parson and, as a transition from residential buildings down to the banks of the Inn zone, Johannes Wiesflecker built a high-standard student’s residence with generously designed rooms and common areas all packed into two basic square buildings of different character. Beneath the building is a hollow space serving as a passage to the Inn.

A new building for an "inclusive” school was erected directly adjacent to the "Hauptschule Hötting”, a "classic” of Tyrolean Modernism. In reaction to the existent development and the attractive location near the Inn, Helmut Reitter developed a roundly oriented structure that takes up the building lines of the surroundings. In the interior, the attention was directed to the interstices; instead of corridors in the actual sense there is a varied succession of paths and "squares” with a large variety of open areas.

From the outside, the solitary building at the university bridge – a residential building mainly built for use by students – presents itself as a shiny white "monolith” with a distinctive cut off corner and rhythmic offset window openings. A house high "entrance slot” leads to the completely different "inside world” where two bent wall slabs covered with oak slats form a paved courtyard accessible via wide loggia landings.

At the transition from the historic "Anpruggen” district to the Mariahilf urban development area, a residential building with shops on the ground floor was erected for a private investor. The monolithic structure is an example of inner-city densification that fits into the heterogeneous surrounding space on the northern side of the Inn River and places a contemporary accent.

The small residential complex arose on an undeveloped piece of land made available by the Diocese of Innsbruck in the middle of a predominantly small-scaled, villa-like area. Starting from an urban planning context, the architects returned the building site, so to speak, to its "original condition” as a continuous slope and placed three self-confident, free-standing structures, developed in the style of the villa-like tenement blocks, in a newly designed green space.

The facility mainly built of visible concrete and glass, creates, in dimensionally varying layers, a crossover between the landscape, the edge of the slope and the busy road running along the Inn. The inside of the building, which from the side facing the road appears to be cubic, opens up towards the garden through the surrounding open area. Here, numerous sports facilities including an outdoor swimming pool enable children to carry out their activities.

Several educational institutions belonging to the Sisters of Mercy school association are housed in a building complex dating back to the 1930s. In the course of the most recent renovation, conversion and expansion measures, this heterogeneous building stock situation was resolved. A façade made of translucent polycarbonate panels consolidates the various existing buildings; the interior was returned to its concrete structure and complemented with natural materials.

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.

A building from the 1960s, located between the mountain station of the Hungerburgbahn funicular railway and the valley station of the Nordkettenbahn cable railway, has been converted into a concept store with a café-bar and shop. All of the renovation measures aimed to restore the aesthetics of the 1960s and make them come alive in the interior.

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.

It took over 35 years until an inn reopened at the location of the former Umbrüggler Alm. After several failed attempts, the City of Innsbruck tendered an architectural competition in 2013, which Elmar Ludescher and Philip Lutz were able to win with their project. A sloped polyhedral roof covers the organically shaped structure and extends over the south-facing front terrace. Shingled on the outside and appointed with silver fir on the inside, the building is a contemporary interpretation of the "alpine pasture” theme.