Larch veils: an ordinary commercial building is given great urban presence by an external skin of slatted larch screens

Architectural Review, The, Nov, 2003

Whether conscious or not, timber's associations with folksy domesticity tends to inhibit its use in commercial contexts. Baumschlager & Eberle were asked to design a small commercial building in the Vorarlberg village of Wolfurt and responded by employing timber as a precisely detailed external screen that does the usual jobs of filtering light and providing privacy, but also imparts a subtle, organic warmth and texture to a basic box.

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Vorarlberg, on the western edge of Austria, is the country's smallest region, and after Vienna, the most densely populated. Historically, the area has a distinct rural identity, evident in its landscape, its vernacular architecture and a strong (and continuing) tradition of building in wood. Characteristic of an emerging generation of German-speaking Swiss and Austrian architects, Baumschlager & Eberle's work is distinguished by a sober tectonic spirit that also to reinterpret regional traditions and archetypes.

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The client wanted a building that could accommodate the local bank at ground level, with three upper floors that could be used either as flats or as offices. The architects responded to this unedifying inexactitude by designing an utterly simple glazed rectangular box, with a stair tower pulled clear of the main volume on the north side. So far, so conventional, but the inspired move was to enclose the building in a timber screen, elevating a plain box into a tactile, mutable, sensual object.

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Fabricated from square sections of indigenous Austrian larch, the external skin is made up of a series of horizontally slatted sliding screens mounted on a timber sub-frame. The larch lattice filters and diffuses the light, casting shimmering shadows through the interior. It also combats glare and heat build-up, provides privacy when required and gives the facades a degree of pleasing rather than dreary homogeneity, for the timber screen encloses the entire building, apart from the bank frontage at street level. Within the apparently uniform facade, however, the random movements of the screens generate changing, unpredictable geometries that dignify and enliven the public realm. C.K.

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Architect

Baumschlager & Eberle, Lochau, Austria

Photographs

Edward Huebner

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BANK, WOLFURT, AUSTRIA