Media attention.

In a largely standardised office building for the latest communications technology, design effort has been focused on creating public spaces that encourage social interaction.

Vorarlberg is the Westernmost province of Austria, bordering Switzerland and Germany at the corner of Lake Constance. The publisher of the newspaper Vorarlberger Nachrichten, a long established family business, had expanded to employ over 400 people and outgrew its old premises at the centre of Bregenz. The first major investment was a new automated setting and printing plant. Large, with noisy machines running night and day and constant lorry access, it could scarcely be placed in the heart of the city.

A suitable site was found on the edge of Schwarzach, a village to the south-west with bus and rail connections. The desire to concentrate the whole operation on a single site with plenty of room and good communications soon prompted the firm to move its offices there as well. The stated reason was increased efficiency of operation, but the firm clearly relished the opportunity to display its progressive ethos, both to its own employees and to the wider world, while its new buildings also inevitably reflect its growing economic power. The owner/proprietor, Eugen Russ, is fully aware of the emblematic power of architecture, and also commissioned a new house from Ernst Giselbrecht a year or so earlier. Client and architect have known each other from childhood, for Giselbrecht was born and brought up in Vorarlberg before he went to study in Graz, where he made his reputation and now runs his office.

The site lies in a valley running almost northsouth, between a railway to the west and road to the east. The printing works, already at an advanced stage when the office was commissioned, had been placed east-west across the site.(1) Giselbrecht set the office block parallel to it, creating two court-like spaces between the buildings by linking them centrally with a single-storey glazed passage. He left the land to the north free for expansion, and if a further block is built, the current open car parking will be shifted to its basement.

The office had to be built extremely quickly- it was only 15 months on site - and flexibility of use was a high priority. Strict dimensional coordination was essential if components made simultaneously but separately would fit together, and relatively long production runs were required to make components economical. These pressures led to a typically repetitive linear building with a regular bay rhythm and standard details. It has three identical storeys of offices looking north and south divided by a central circulation spine. A couple of service cores with linking stairwells subdivide the long body into three zones, lifts being provided in the middle and at the front end. The concrete column and slab structure rests on piles and the envelope is a sophisticated aluminium and glass cladding system. As in earlier Giselbrecht buildings, such as the HTBLA technical college near Graz (AR November 1995), this includes semi-automatic motorised elements for solar protection.

Internal environmental control in the new building is also technically advanced. Floor slabs and deep foundation piles were cast with regular runs of plastic piping, snaking to and fro for plenty of contact and without embedded joints.(2) Water pumped through the floor pipes can heat or cool the structure of the building, whose considerable thermal mass keeps the temperature very stable at around 22 degrees Celsius. The pipes in the piles can allow heat loss to underground water for cooling in summer, or heat gain through heat pumps in winter. A significant proportion of winter heat is also extracted from the hot machines in the printing factory, reducing the load on the boiler, the heat source of last resort.

The elements so far described outline a building system that could be endlessly repeated and imposed more or less anywhere, potentially soulless and placeless. What saves Giselbrecht's building from this fate and relates it back directly to the site is the special area of the building where irregular and one-off things are allowed to happen- the entrance and entrance hall. This has received a disproportionate amount of architectural effort, for it is also the focus of community life. Such a building placed on a greenfield site needs to make its presence felt at a distance and at a glance, for people are either arriving by car needing to know where to go or flashing past at 50mph, hence the great scale.

The overhanging plate of roof comes through unbroken, supported by a giant order of columns to make a three-storey portico. To the right side a low projection adds necessary accommodation and softens the linearity. More crucially a huge curved wall that bounds it where it projects- the only curve in the complex- sweeps in, guiding visitors around from the car park and creating enclosure in the otherwise open site. This is counterpointed on the left by a pond, out of which grows a special vertical element twice the height of the building, the Lichtsaule (lightcolumn) by artist Gottfried Bechtold.

Physically, this is an element ranking somewhere between flagpole and tower, but the message it carries is more subtle. Light emitting elements running from top to bottom, and bright enough to be seen by day, allow an instant colour display from any part of the spectrum. This is controlled by a computer program linked to the incoming newsline. It depends on indices and keywords to which it will react, but the program is designed to learn, as the computer counts the number of times certain words are used, and so on. Sometimes the changes of light and colour are fast, sometimes slow. When there is some major tragedy, it apparently goes a deep purple. The pattern is not specifically legible, but it is not random either, worked out with no understanding but with flawless and unfathomable logic by the machine: very postmodern. On the top of the column is a strobelight, wired by radio-link to the frequency of the artist's heart. This is the 'subjective' element as opposed to the 'objective' message of the colours.

The great portico is screened from the weather by two glass screen walls carried by their own steel structure. They intersect, and their ends project out of the building a couple of metres beyond the roofline to show their independence. Breaking through these glass walls almost like free pavilions gathered beneath the sheltering roof are the low porter's lodge and the tower of the lift-shaft. Entry is via automatic glass doors in the end glass wall, leading to a hall with galleries and a running stair leading right to the top. Everything is laid out for the visitor to see: to right of the entrance, conveniently close, is the conference room. The middle level front contains the main office, nerve centre of the whole, with the proprietor's personal office at the end, separated by a glass wall that can be changed from clear to milky at the touch of a button, On the top floor the same area of the building is a restaurant with a partly covered roof-terrace. The effect of all this is to make the 'prow' the heart and community centre, to generate an immediate sense of place.

The offices have the latest computer equipment, with sophisticated servers in the basement, and editors and reporters can have laptops radio-linked to the main system, thus usable anywhere in the building. With mobile phones also on an internal system, they are not tied to particular desks, so can work in any office, in the restaurant or even outside within the range of the radio link. This system allows great flexibility, so that for example a new team can quickly be assembled for a particular task and assigned a space. Architecturally, it means that the office floors must be open to changing configurations of use, including changing partitioning if necessary.

A growth area for the firm is the Internet, which it sees as the natural successor to print journalism. Although it earns the bulk of its income at the moment from newspapers, it is investing heavily in electronic communication and has a substantial team building web pages and offering net connections, hoping to become the regional distributor over a wide region, embracing Germany to the north, Switzerland to the west and Austria to the east. People will in due course pay to subscribe by card. Editors will produce their electronic newspaper or magazine and distribute it instantly as they wish. This is the future: it is only a matter of time, they think. It may mean a cultural change as major as the switch from the monastery scriptorium initiated by Gutenberg.

The irony for the media centre is that it grew here rather than elsewhere for the sake of print, and but for print it could be back in the centre of the city or anywhere else, perhaps even without provoking its worker-inhabitants to commute the main reason for making a building that is all entrance. It has often been pointed out that electronic media would make it possible for everyone to work at home communicating by line or through the ether. But the telephone and fax, which have been with us for some time, have been very selectively used: we still insist on doing so many things face to face. And for many people, work is still a social experience whose whole existence depends on the rules and rituals of the workplace, and on the working persona assumed with the suit. For bosses of course, the temporal rhythms of the workplace are the main means of policing the workforce. I have long suspected that the backward- as well as forward-looking Lloyds building was more about the preservation of corporate identity than the move to new technology, and that this was the main reason not to disperse across London relying on electronic links. It is perhaps the same with Giselbrecht's Media Centre: a social network needs a place to have relationships however virtual an electronic one may be.

1 Giselbrecht was able to make superficial changes for the visual consistency of the complex, but the main decisions had already been taken before he was commissioned.

2 Minimum cover of 50mm was specified, The separate circuits are so numerous that the occasional damaged pipe can simply be abandoned without significantly affecting the overall performance.