|
Just how Graz’s playfully named HoG, or ‘Hope of Glory’ Architektur entered the scene is as noteworthy as their first civic scale project, the award winning Linz Schlossberg Museum, one of the key buildings in the city’s Capital of Culture developments. And indeed, so intertwined are the lives of HoG and the Schlossberg Museum, that it would be impossible not to discuss their emergence in unison.
From conception to completion, the project has been riddled with stories. Over three years ago, just a few months after winning the contest, founding partner Martin Emmerer presented the competition drawings for the museum as his final university project. He did so to a knowing crowd for all his classmates and professors knew the project had already won and that somehow the proposal in front of them was to be built. No-one knew how yet, but there was a goal and commitment to its realisation. To launch the process, HoG Gmbh was formed, a partnership between Emmerer’s school friend Clemens Luser, and most touchingly, Clemens’ dad, old hand, Hansjörg Luser.
|
|
|
The competition entry was favoured by the judges largely due to its nuanced response to the site, over a fire ruined wing of the castle or Schloss, and commanding views of the old town and the Danube. As proposed, a relatively solid mass completes the Hof, or courtyard, roughly in the place of the old wing and following the line of the steep fortifications, rising sheerly from the hilltop. However, the exhibition spaces are divided at entrance level by a glazed or otherwise open storey. In this transparent zone the containment of the perimeter wall is broken both visually and physically. Hidden below are three exhibition and service floors. Above are a gallery and an events hall which both boast spectacular views over the city and back into the Hof. Especially in the evening, when lights in its underbelly are set to flicker, this top floor appears, as they told me, “like a friendly space craft hovering over the town”.
The fortified wall above which the extension sits is bent. This change of axis is simply matched by the new building to the exterior that faces towards the old town, but to the interior, or Hof, the angle is bridged by a smartly tilted glass wall. This inclined plane foils the feeling of containment still further and creates odd reflections of the castle and the sky. More is made of this surface as it hits the grade and its transparent effect is inverted as it continues underground as an overhanging monolithic concrete wall which organises the vertical circulation. Another strange moment occurs when a tunnel, connecting the new to the existing buildings, is driven through it.
|
In addition to better connecting the existing wings, the building also cleverly accommodates access to the Schlossberg, or castle-hill, with a subterranean stair, that tunnels through the fortified wall and bypasses a long, existing ascent better suited to vehicles. The architects felt it was important from the outset to create such access, reformatting the Hof to ease mobility, host events and create a public promenade which opens the best views in town over the city for all – not only to paying customers. And from the furthest point of this promenade one can see the ‘Ars Electronica Centre’ and the ‘Lentos Art Museum’. They all blink at one another across the Danube with electronic lights from behind their steel and glass skins and thus three of Linz’s newest buildings are visually connected in a cultural triangle that will hopefully succeed in enriching the city long after 2009’s capital of culture is over.
