Outrage - architectural folly

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 1995 by Peter Blundell Jones

This would-be chic garage, with its jutting diagonals and redundant bridge, shows how easily architecture can be reduced to parodic effects and mere style.

Kartner Strasse in western Graz was once the main road to Klagenfurt, but it is now a charmless multi-lane traffic artery forever filled with roaring vehicles, and lined with solitary object buildings and display hoardings which compete with one another for attention. Amid this blaring urban cacophony Robinson's garage strikes a bold pose.

At first glance, with its odd roofs, its structural display and ks jutting diagonals, it seems to epitomise the New Graz Architecture in its wilder moments. Doubtless, too, this was the intended impression. But look more closely and it makes no sense. The structure does not answer any kind of human logic, nor does the form reflect any necessary organisation. Most redundant of all is the bridge, rising at the prow of the building to hover over a small pond, which then lamely returns on the other side. The pond exists simply to give the bridge something to traverse, and seems rather forlorn in this desert of tarmac and concrete.

The whole drama is a sales gimmick, a means of attracting attention: a chic up-to-the-moment place for buying chic up-to-the-moment cars. Perhaps it does indeed sell cars, but it also provides us with a timely reminder of how easily architecture can be reduced to mere style. With its repetition of forms borrowed from more serious contexts and used purely for the sake of effect, it reads as a parody of the more serious work shown elsewhere in this issue, but without much of a smile on its face.