architek[tour] tirol – guide to architecture in tyrol

The church for the new Olympic Village was Lackner’s first major building. With the spatial organisation as well as the then "strange” choice of materials (raw concrete, granite cobblestones) he was way ahead of his time. The square central congregation room rests on a somewhat higher podium and is encircled by a low balustrade wall. This rather closed "central box”, as one might describe it, is then surrounded, on a slightly lower lever, by a stations of the Cross assageway the glass panels of which open up to the everyday life outside.

The striking trench-shaped roof of the white building is not a mere theatrical gesture, it is meant to convey that this is a very special building. At the same time, it holds the wooden ceiling of the interior, thus creating a very introspective room for worshipping. The light strictly comes from above; this and the minimalistic choice of only two materials for the interior strongly underline the sacrality this space is meant to exude.

With this small indoor pool in a private garden Lackner gave a totally new meaning to what apparently was a rather insignificant and traditional task. It is a small, freely and unconventionally shaped closed space; the light filters through seven Perspex cupolas. It is, thus, also a very intimate private space, and the light dancing on the water adds sensuous joy to the swimming. After a change of ownership, the bath was destroyed in 2018.

To create the necessary space for a variety of purposes without, however, outgrowing the scale, both in area and volume, of the surrounding buildings, Lackner designed a two-storey building, setting the congregation room, most unusually, on the top floor. The main building is more or less "a house just like any other”, but is then upgraded by a lateral cover and a ceiling ideally as well as structurally separated from it.

The patron wanted an economical wooden house, so Lackner "simply” designed a wooden structure radially hanging from a concrete pile. The consequent mushroom-like shape beautifully responds also to the special needs of the patron. The very self-assertive building, although not resembling any familiar typology, due to the choice of materials, fits well into the environment.

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.

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.

Across the street from the "South Tyrolean Settlement” of the ‘40s, Lackner built his version of low-income housing. The rather flat and long-stretched volume is accentuated by wave-like rising structures above the four entrance areas; the apartments here are shifted upwards by a half storey. The rhythm of the spacious oriels that are a characteristic element of these buildings is determined by the different types and sizes of the apartments.

For quite a while now, the Binder wood corporation has made architectural quality part of its corporate identity, small wonder, then, that Josef Lackner was asked – among others – to realize several buildings for the company. With the shingles wrapping the striking building, Lackner calls the viewers’ attention to the fact that wood is, after all, what the company is about. Wood is also the main material chosen for the interior, creating an unmistakable special flair.

This is a both structurally and spatially most intriguing variation on the theme of industrial buildings: Without any support, folding wood box elements stretch over two shops, each 44 m broad and over 100 m long. Through glass panels along the single elements, which somewhat resemble boats turned upside down, daylight flows in freely. The zigzag movement of the diagonal entrenchments adds rhythm to the façade.

To the adjacent building south of this one, Lackner (1995-96) added a "crown”, the Brenner archive, thus substantially redefining both its shape and identity.

In order to only minimally disturb services at the pre-existing university cafeteria and to make optimal use of the available building area, Lackner sort of built a bridge over the cafeteria. Glazed steel frames in brilliant orange stretch over the old building that was also given a brush-up in the process. Receding terraces contain seminar rooms and the library of the school of translators, transforming the old cafeteria building into a "city balcony” next to the river.

For the Dinkhauser packaging materials corporation, Lackner realized one of his last works. The lot sort of had grown with the enterprise, reorganizing it was an essential part of the task. So he added a new high-shelve storage area with unsupported steel frames stretching over 25 m to an existing shop. Large prefabricated concrete elements and triangular glass panels are the dominant elements that masterfully catch the attention of passers-by.