Aging gracefully.

Klaus Kada is one of the leading architects of Graz and his work is always stimulating. Regular readers who noticed his Togl house (AR February 1992) and student hostel in Graz (AR November 1993) will recognise his latest work as a new variation on Kada themes: the articulation of blocks, the oversailing butterfly roofs, the bridges and glazed connections, the careful layering of elements. Even so, the new building has its own somewhat relaxed scale, new details, and conveys an optimistic air of freshness and poise. The site is dead flat and suburban, villa territory near the edge of the sleepy little town of Leibnitz, which lies on the plain about 30 miles south of Graz close to the Slovenian border. The old people's home contains 19 single rooms with integrated bathrooms along with community rooms including a chapel, surgeries, services and administration. It is intended for those unable to look after themselves, providing medical services and around the clock nursing when necessary.

The site is approached via a cul-de-sac running along its north side, and is L-shaped, with its long arm running south. Kada decided on a linked pair of blocks, essentially two-storey but with a basement for services reached by a ramp on the east side. The two blocks have contrasted characters: a thin one faces west and a broader one south. To the north they embrace an entrance court. The long southern tail of the site remains open as the main garden, while the west-facing block looks across its own narrower garden towards trees on the boundary. This block is thin because it consists in section only of a room and passage on each floor, while the southern or main block has a central hall and rooms facing both ways. On the ground floor the main block has a band of offices facing north and kitchens to west, but most of the space is given to a large open-plan community room that opens directly onto the garden. On its east side, a curved two-metre high partition in the tradition of Corbusian plan libre defines the chapel, with its altar appropriately orientated. A large curved sliding door is included in the partition, which can be left open to allow the participation of the bedridden, who are wheeled into the larger space beyond.

At the north end of the communal space is the main stair, running in an open well with skylight over, and next to it a bed-sized lift. Starting on line with the main entrance. the stair presents itself invitingly to those arriving, while also indicating the westward location of the bulk of the accommodation. At its head it swings into a natural anti-clockwise turn around the well. The rooflight above is sliced off at an angle towards its east end, helping confirm that the wide west end is the main one.

On the first floor, the south side of the main block is given to a band of private rooms, while the north houses surgeries and a special bathroom. The passage serving the rooms makes the link through to the western block, its axis terminating in the only room dedicated to communal purposes. On the west facade of the building, the presence of this communal room is indicated by glazing brought forward, while the private rooms to either side retreat behind generous balconies under the overhanging roof - an effective solar control measure.

The single-loaded corridors on the east side of the block are entirely glazed with a frameless system, making them feel open like access galleries, and giving generous views out. The glass facade also makes their function legible from the outside. Slight angle shifts in the site boundaries led Kada to move the angle of the western block about two degrees away from that of the main block. This makes the building sit more elegantly on the plot in plan, but it was by no means a compulsion, for it could almost as easily have been accommodated at right angles, and would certainly have been easier to construct that way. But the shift underlines the whole nature of Kada's thinking, for it is clear that he wanted two independent blocks, not a single one bent or extended. They are essentially linear elements, and the glazed gap between them dramatises the transition. The links at first floor level are made with bridges, which, due to the angle shift, are of different lengths. The shift stresses the independence of the blocks, adding to the suggestion that they are two different territories. To avoid fudging the junction of the roof, the glazed east face of the west block rises above both roofs into a projecting skylight, and where the two blocks meet the roof-gap is closed with horizontal glazing of the simplest kind. The mullion-less glass wall has its own supporting structure of thin steel columns.

Moving about the building, there are spectacular views both to the outside and from level to level. For the old people, the outsideness of the glazed corridor recreates at reduced scale a suggestion of public space, mimicking perhaps the transition from home to community, and providing a visual equivalent to the trip out to shops or pub that can no longer be made. It is certainly a very welcome change from the type of dark, artificially lit double-loaded corridor that so often results from the 'rational' and economic planning of such institutions, which treats people as yet another fluid to be plumbed in.

There is also the great advantage of legibility, of knowing where one is and where one is going. In Kada's building the spatial sequence presents itself with commendable clarity. As with earlier work, much of the building is straightforward and orthogonal, but three apparently minor gestures in plan are used to considerable effect: the angle shift, the curved chapel wall, and the diagonally cut skylight. The variations in section and elevation are equally important, leaving the faces of the building dramatically different, depending on whether one is looking at private rooms with deep balconies, the glazed corridor, or offices with fixed clerestories and opening windows beneath an overhanging roof. The timber cladding of thin horizontal strips of melamine-lacquered plywood sheet seems insubstantial next to the apparent solidity of the roof edge, emphasising the roof plane and increasing the sense of shelter. Kada has made a visually and spatially rich building within the limitations of a normally uninspiring building type - and to normal costs.