Styrian surprise: Combining a highly thoughtful use of materials with a strong civic presence, Szyszkowitz-Kowalski's new multipurpose hail in a small styrian village is a surprisingly vigorous addition to community life - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, Nov, 2001 by Peter Blundell Jones

St Ulrich im Greich is a wine-growing village in a picturesque landscape of small hills in southern Styria close to the Slovenian border. Szyszkowitz-Kowalski was commissioned to make a multipurpose hall for meetings and conferences as well as festivities and concerts. It has added it to the west end of a series of buildings that make up the village centre, set along the shoulder of the hill, so it now marks the west edge of the centre. The east entrance was made through an existing school and past its kindergarten, and the south-west one makes a new public corner for the complex. The hill drops sharply away to the north, and Szyszkowitz-Kowalski exploited the slope to make a terraced hall entered from the top. Beneath the new foyer that links hail to street and school, the architect included some basement rooms for cloakrooms and storage. An exhibition room side-lit from the north links hall and school at basement level, and a paved terrace on top extends the space of the foyer into the open air for interval drinking.

In such a conservative and sleepy rural place, the bold architecture of the hall is unexpected. Four corner pylons of masonry support a roof in three curves that rises against the slope. The division into three brings down the scale of what could have been rather a large box, and gives a rhythm played off against surrounding roofs. Multiple strips of horizontal glazing give fascinating dappled light within. It changes through the day, and makes the scale of the building intriguingly difficult to read from outside, while stressing the corner pylons, which are left solid. Asymmetrical seating on several levels with a side gallery to the east but not to the west suggests that this is a hall for social interaction, not just the standard division between producers and consumers. It is small enough to seem intimate and to allow for natural acoustics.

The strong colours blend with the rest of the village surprisingly well, the ambiguities of scale are well-judged, and the whole building is gentler in reality than it seems in photographs, lively rather than impertinent. Corner pylons are covered with grey glazed tiles from a special local manufacturer and the red siding is protected from the weather by angled glass slats that produce a richer visual experience at close quarters. As with other Szyszkowitz-Kowalski buildings, the layering of the visible construction is imaginatively exploited for its depth and texture without the building being in any sense a consistent exercise in structural truthfulness. The main steel trusses are visible, it is true, but the plan shows the pylons to be thin walls rather than the massive solids that they appear from without. Their curved form, reminiscent of battered fortifications, is also in a sense illusory because the structural walls beneath are vertical. The whole effect seems curiously Chinese. One cannot imagine any rural British or American community enjoying such an outspoken work in their midst, or any planning committee responding to such a proposal with anything but horror, so wedded are we to the assumption that a village hall must look like a faked-up old barn, but the people of St Ulrich have taken their new hall to their hearts.