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Austria's friendly alien - Front Page - ultra high tech Kunsthaus Graz
Art in America, Sept, 2003 by David Ebony
On Sept. 22, the new Kunsthaus Graz, a large venue for contemporary am, debuts in Graz, Austria's second largest city. The approximately $40-million, 120,000-square-foot, three-level building was paid for in part by federal funds and local public sources as well as by Graz 2003, which oversees EU funds allocated to the town as this year's cultural capital of Europe. Nicknamed "a friendly alien" by local residents, the building, designed by the London-based architectural team of Peter Cook and Colin Fournier, has an organic shape with a skin made of shimmering blue acrylic panels. At night, the building glows by means of a computerized lighting system beneath the translucent skin. With large, tubelike "nozzles" for windows that protrude from the convex roof, the structure indeed suggests an outer-space creature that has landed in the middle of Graz's historic town center along the banks of the Mur River.
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While the ultra-high-tech building may strike some as a jarring contrast to its historic surroundings, Fournier told Art in America that the biomorphic shape of the Kunsthaus was intended to correspond to the onion domes and other sinuous features of the city's numerous works of Baroque and Rococo architecture. One side of the museum incorporates the ornate facade and renovated interior of a late 19th-century building. Fournier also stressed the new structure's relationship to the curvaceous modernist forms and experimental materials employed in the postwar era by Volker Giencke and other well-known architects of the so-called Graz School.
The first floor of the Kunsthaus contains a large glass-enclosed street-level lobby facing the river, with two main entrances, a cafe, a media lounge and a bookstore. The lobby overlooks Vito Acconci's nearby Island in the Mur, a high-tech performance space situated in the middle of the river, which debuted last January and has quickly become a popular venue for experimental music and dance [see "Front Page," Feb. '03].
A gently sloping 100-foot-long moving walkway in the Kunsthaus transports visitors from the ground floor to the second level, which features a 9,500-square-foot exhibition space with 15-foot ceilings, an interactive information area and a large recreation room for children.
Another moving walkway takes visitors to the upper exhibition area. Here. the 11,000-square-foot exhibition space is dramatically lit by artificial light sources as well as by natural light from the nozzles, whose apertures are outfitted with slats that automatically open and close according to the sun's intensity. A number of the nozzles are positioned to offer stunning views of nearby monuments, such as the town's iconic Schlossberg, a medieval hilltop clocktower built on the ruins of an ancient Roman fort. Movable walls and lighting fixtures offer various possibilities to curators.
On one side of the upper level, an elongated, glass-enclosed cafe overlooks the city. Below this deck are the Kunsthaus's administration offices, and also those of Camera Austria, a photo journal and archive that will take up residence in the Kunsthaus and organize a series of exhibitions there. The first will be a survey of photos by the late French theorist Pierre Bourdieu [Nov. 11, 2003-Feb. 6, 2004]. Though the building and its facilities open in September, the Kunsthaus's exhibition program, organized by director Peter Pakesch, does not get under way until mid-October, with exhibitions, events and exact dates to be announced.
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