Mutant bagpipe invades Graz: the recent inauguration of Peter Cook's remarkable new Kunsthaus in Graz crowns the city's year as European Cultural Capital.

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The wraps have finally come off Peter Cook and Colin Fournier's 'friendly alien' in Graz. The formal unveiling of the new Kunsthaus at the end of October marked the much anticipated highpoint of the city's activities as European Cultural Capital 2003. Clad in a shimmering skin of blue acrylic panels. Cook's singular construction (mutant bagpipe, blob, bubble) takes its place in a Graz skyline already vigorously animated by onion dome spires, castles and clocktowers, not to mention assorted modern Grazer Schule interventions. In joining this assemblage, the Kunsthaus can be regarded not simply as a fashionable grotesque, but a genuine extension of the region's tradition of architectural boldness and invention. Cook and Graz go back a long way, and the new building reflects an expressive empathy with the city and its evolution.

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Almost 150 years after Graz's Eisernes Haus (the Iron House) caused a sensation as the first cast-iron construction in Central Europe (built with iron from Sheffield), Cook and Fournier's Kunsthaus signposts an equally audacious benchmark. Its seductive, bulging volume nestles snugly into the prominent riverside site, coming tantalizingly close to, but never touching, its neighbours (the geometry of the surrounding buildings, including the Eisernes Haus, acted as a template for the basic form). Its sleek contours are also a vehicle for artistic expression. Devised by Berlin-based design group BIX, the building facade becomes a 'communication membrane', an ever shifting, winking, pulsating surface, animated by signs, images and even low resolution films. Beneath the translucent acrylic skin are 930 standard 40w fluorescent lights shaped like doughnuts. Each lamp acts like a pixel controlled by a central computer to create changing light installations.

Inside, travelators connect the various gallery spaces, so that visitors can glide up through the building (a la Centre Pompidou) and then walk down and explore the exhibitions. The atmosphere is consciously informal and a stylish cafe at street level is also calculated to entice the casual flaneur. The topmost gallery is lit by a series of decidedly anatomical looking nozzles that funnel and filter daylight into the space below. One aperture (the 'naughty nozzle' as Cook calls it) frames a picture postcard view of the Schlossberg, one of Graz's best known landmarks (think of Edinburgh Castle on its volcanic outcrop). The restored Eisernes Haus is now also part of the new complex, housing photographic galleries, archives and offices for Camera Austria.

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With their distended walls and fluid plans, the galleries present an obvious challenge to curators, but the opening show of work by contemporary artists including Anthony Caro, Chuck Close, Olafur Eliasson, Elsworth Kelly and Remy Zaugg seemed quite at ease with the spatially unorthodox. There is no permanent collection, but the Kunsthaus is aiming to become an ICA-style laboratory for the edgy and experimental, cutting across disciplines and forging partnerships with cultural institutions in neighbouring Slovenia and Croatia. All this might seem rather much for a city in thrall to Stryian conformity and comfort (loden coats and gemutlich), but the Kunsthaus seems genuinely popular with the locals. By far the best view of it is from the hillside paths of the nearby Schlossberg, where perambulating families stop in their tracks to admire the latest provocative addition to their cityscape. The AR will return to it in more detail early next year.

CATHERINE SLESSOR

www.kunsthausgraz.at

Photographs by Paul Raftery/VIEW