Spirit of ecstasy.

Gunther Domenig has formed the entrance building to a new industrial park in the Carinthian countryside as a gesture of welcome and hope, while creating subtle and gentle office spaces.

Gunther Domenig has never been lost for a gesture. His bank in Favoriten, a rather poor and dull suburb of Vienna, was one of the funniest, most acerbic, joyous, critical, and amazingly crafted buildings of the early '80s (AR November 1980, p263). Its plastically flowing stainless-steel spandrels appear at first to be falling off the concrete frame in a movement that seems simultaneously to imply the collapse of capitalism and, as the sheets bunch up over the entrance, the system's sinister power to suck you in. And that was only the outside: the interior with its writhing entrails of pipes and the great model of the grasping hand (Domenig's) was perhaps even more alarming. No-one outside Austria could quite make out how an architect could persuade a client from such a conservative background to make such a critical, expensive and, above all, enjoyable building. No-one inside Austria could understand how the lad from the provinces (born in Carinthia and teaching in Graz) had pulled it off in the capital.

In the intervening years, Domenig's architecture has always seemed fascinating, full of incident, tenderness, toughness, and a generous imaginative understanding of humanity (see for instance his housing at Graz-Neufeldweg, AR December 1988, p73 and the hospital at Bruck, AR October 1995, p74). The huge new half-kilometre long teaching block that he is now building for the University of Graz will be a triumph of humane thinking and placemaking over institutionalism. But however good all this work may be, many of us wondered whether Herr Professor Domenig was confining his exuberance and joie de vivre to the Steinhaus that he is so slowly and carefully building for himself by the Ossiachersee (AR August 1986, p81).

His new building for the Industriepark at Volkermarkt, a country town some 10 miles east of Klagenfurt, shows how wrong we were. Here was a project that demanded gesture: the gateway building to a new area of light industry and offices where the Land of Carinthia is investing much care and money in the hope that 800 sorely needed jobs will be generated. The thing stands on a green field, and with a huge swirling gesture of filigree steel and glass it beckons you to come into the (as yet non-existent) enterprise area. Domenig seems to have moderated his visual criticisms of the capitalist system since the Favoriten bank (or perhaps he is much happier to celebrate buildings for productive work than ones that simply suck in and ejaculate money). It is difficult to see how this building could be construed as a criticism of the system - er, well, perhaps it is a claw against the sky, or possibly a tattered crow's feather with its filaments flying. But the main impression is of welcome and thrust, the swirling curve of a powerful living, glossy bird's wing: a signal of strength, virility, generosity and hope.

The building's programme is simple: the wing contains administration, and the block parallel to the wing's concrete podium is a strip of relatively straightforward, dumb one-and-a-half-storey manufacturing spaces. These are connected to the base of the wing by a bridge that links their upper level gallery to the top of the podium that contains the cafe. From the podium springs the concrete tower containing lift and stairs which appears from some angles to be the wing's armature or support.

It is not: as is clear from the moment of entry to the site, the main structure that carries the curve of the glistening wing is a row of four concrete columns on the south front and a similar row on the other face which is stiffened with a vertical concrete plate. This concrete structure supports the light steel cage which contains the office accommodation and cantilevers so dramatically against the sky.

The theme of this issue is praise of a high standard of ordinariness in the creation of workplaces (p4). Outwardly, Domenig's building is plainly quite different: it presents a remarkable degree of extraordinariness in its figure. Yet look at the plans and sections: the workshop areas are simply and economically made; the offices, for all the gestures, are subtle and complex spaces, delicately related to each other by changes of level, and they offer remarkable views of the marvellous landscape.

There is a stark contrast between the bravery of the Austrians - who believe that you can modify the market to be more humane by judicious injections of public money, effort and yes, even architectural imagination and love -and the drear squalid drab PoMo of Anglo-Saxon and French equivalents of this industrial park. Could there be any relationship between Austrian economic and cultural idealism and that country's very high public prosperity and private standard of living?