BREAKING THE BOX.

Exploding like a flower in the middle of a regimented Modernist campus, this new Study Centre exploits formal and material contrast, skews the dominant axis and creates intimate spaces for socializing and study.

Graz's Technical University campus was laid out in the flat southern suburbs of the city in the I 1960s. Once part of the floodplain of the river Mur, it had become an area of humdrum housing, but the houses were interspersed with bits of former meadow which persisted as sports fields, gardens and allotments. The university was given all necessary space, but as a lone institution lacked the bustle of urban life: the institutes marched along the empty streets in efficient box-like structures, disciplined largely by the rules of their own construction. The dominant colour was the grey of exposed aggregate concrete panels and, typically for that era, the most celebrated structure was not a place for people but the hangar-like hall for high-voltage electricity experiments, a notable structure by Graz professor and former Bauhaus pupil Hubert Hoffmann. Taking stock in the late '80s, the university realized that it needed workrooms and recreational facilities for students as well as floorspace for a couple of minor institutes, but what it needed above all was a local focus and heart for the campus, a building to inject some social life. They held a national competition in 1990 which was won by Szyszkowitz-Kowalski. [1] After various economic delays and considerable changes in the brief, the new Study Centre has finally been realized 10 years later. With library and cafeteria dominating the ground floor, it has become rather like a cultural centre in a small town.

From the start, Szyszkowitz-Kowalski concentrated on the idea of an open courtyard as an outdoor room, used as a meeting place and extension of the student cafeteria. It is not a completely enclosed space: rather cleverly it opens out towards the west to combine with what is almost another outdoor room contained with the help of neighbouring buildings. Both spaces have seats and tables, but the inner one also has a network of hanging cables to support climbing plants, a pergola at enormous scale. So in a few years the progression will be further dramatized, the outer court welcoming all who arrive from the west side of the campus while the inner provides a summer haven of cool shade and refreshment.

With its open end and paired wings the plan is essentially horseshoe-shaped, but distorted in its geometry by a 22.5 degree skew which runs through everything except the eastern corner. Based on the switch of angle between the local street-grid and true north, this is a reminder of true cardinal orientation. It skews the whole structural grid, while it also prompts the opposite corners of the plan to swing into a pair of curves. The north wing curls down towards the entry corner, while the south one curls up and away from the main road to indicate entry into the space shared with the buildings to the west. The whole building seems to be flexing its muscles against the inherited planning grid that dominates the campus, but the local effects are also important. Because of the curve, the library in the north wing gains a tapered shape to become appropriately broad at its entrance end, while the west ends of both wings similarly gain a series of pointed forms ending with balconies and fire-stairs. These irregular stepped and fragmented terminations contrast crucially with the normal corners to north and east, which are both vertical and orthogonal. The eastern corner where the main entrance is set is even symmetrical about its diagonal axis, the entrance doors being placed to either side of a completely square stair tower. Formality here is played against the informality behind.

Just as the plan is about differentiating the east end from the west, the key gesture of the whole building, so the section differentiates inside from out. On the courtyard side, the warm orange facades are relatively softer and made to slope inwards, funnel-like, to admit more light. This also means that the building form creates more sense of an arena. But the cool green and grey facades on the outside facing the streets cantilever out, high and remote, with giant order columns for the lower two floors and overhanging eaves over. To provoke an ambiguity of scale and make the entrance more welcoming, the stair tower has two layers of horizontal windows per floor, an effect notably present on one of the few preserved early Modernist buildings of Graz, the City Administration Office, [2] but the architects claim not to have consciously imitated this.

Internally, the building is strongly layered, with the top two floors given over to various kinds of study and seminar room including a large computer suite. The greatest spatial drama is a pedestrian bridge slung across the courtyard as a shortcut between the two wings. The lower two floors contain the larger and more public elements: the library on two levels in the north wing, the cafeteria and art school in the south with the school of electronic music above. The cafeteria is the social heart, making the necessary link between entrance corner and internal court. Facade treatment on the street side distinguishes the top floors from the lower two with horizontal cladding, but otherwise there is no directly legible articulation, so the passers-by could hardly guess the presence of art-school, electronic music department or library. With fast-changing policies and independent estates departments ordering university accommodation according to demand, it is getting increasingly difficult to dedicate university buildings to clear and singular functions: for better or worse this kind of confusing mix is everywhere the norm.

There are times when particular kinds of architect get jobs perfectly suited to their talents, and this is one. The success of Szyszkowitz-Kowalski's building lies most of all in the contrast it makes with its neighbours. Hoffmann's Electrical Institute to the west (1965-72) is typically Modernist: rationally conceived and assembled, it is inevitably understated and unexuberant. The recently completed IT Centre which lies to the north-west was designed after the Study Centre but built at the same time. It is the work of Graz minimalists Riegler-Riewe, who once both worked for Szyszkowitz-Kowalski, but on becoming independent reacted strongly the other way. Their building takes the Neo-Rationalism of the 1990s- the Swiss-box style - to a new extreme, with a system of rigid rectangular blocks divided by linear glazed passages. System is all, no special ends, middles, polarities, instead rather random interruptions of the grid. It takes on the discipline of the circuit board with interchangeable components, and seems to suggest that the original Modernists were not hard enough, their greys too colourful, their details too complicated. The students have rather aptly nicknamed it 'Alcatraz'.

Placed right next door to this dour work, and in a campus full of rather boxy buildings, the Szyszkowitz-Kowalski Study Centre explodes like a flower. It is about breaking the system, skewing the axis, having a head and tail and making the most of the contrast between them. Were the whole campus so frenetic it would doubtless be tiresome, but it is the right building in the right place.

(1.) The original competition scheme was published in Szyszkowitz + Kowalski by Ardrea Gleininger, Wasmuth 1994 Edition Axel Menges, pp 194-195.

(2.) Built in 1928 on Andreas Hofer Platz and designed by Rambald von Steinbuchel-Rheinwal.

Architect

Szyszkowitz-Kowalski, Graz

Project team

Karla Kowalski, Michael Szyszkowitz,

Marcus Schulz, Werner Wratschko, Phillip Habsburg-Lothringen, Manfred Suanjak, Alexander Vhyshnevskly

General planning

Johann Birner

Photographs

Peter Blundell Jones