A concatenation of places

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

A social housing scheme that makes the most of the orientation and views of a difficult site, while offering a wide range of places and individual dwelling types.

Michael Szyszkowitz and Karla Kowalski are among the internationally best-known architects of the Graz movement, and are the authors of the daring urban corner in Graz (AR June pp56-59). Their oeuvre, like that of Domenig - for whom Szyszkowitz once worked - was part of the reaction against the technical overkill of the 1960s and '70s, a reassertion of the right for architecture to be exciting and expressive. The fascination of their imagery lies in its ambiguity of reference: sometimes the buildings are almost creature-like, at other times they seem to grow out of the landscape. In recent years their work has become somewhat more sober and the better so, but always there seems a strong spirit behind it, and it is consistently inventive.

Social housing, with all its economic and practical restrictions, might seem a poor medium for sculpturally inclined architects, but Szyszkowitz and Kowalski have always responded with ingenuity to a small budget. Looked at closely, their planning is usually not only functional in the best sense, but also deft, exploiting particularities of site and brief. They are also ingenious interpreters of construction, even if their sensibility is decidedly Baroque as opposed to Brutalist. By this I mean that their tectonic attitude is not process-oriented and conceptual like that of Giencke or Kada, but visual and expedient. Far from feeling compelled to show the layering of the constructive process, they are often content - as here - to construct a rough load-bearing carcase that becomes invisible, clad both inside and out. They concentrate their attention rather on the cladding and elements of secondary structure, on what is seen and touched.

The result of a limited competition in 1990, this scheme is a housing development for rental in Voitsberg, an industrial town in western Styria, but of the 51 dwellings planned, only the first 17 have so far been built. The site lies at the bottom of a valley among factories, not far from the Graz-Klagenfurt road. Its outstanding feature is the river and there are good views of the opposite bank, but to enjoy them one faces north-east. The other side looks towards the approach road and factories beyond, but gets the afternoon sun. A principal aim of the scheme was therefore to provide everyone with access to both outlooks, and many flats have balconies on both faces. Parking is at ground level along the west edge of the site.

The housing takes a linear form, with services running along a central spine beneath the ground-floor bathrooms. Apart from the extreme end ones, which are cut to the angle of the site, all dwellings are orthogonally planned, but divided into a series of blocks at changing angles to follow the river-bank. The largest of these at the centre (when built) will be pulled back further from the river to retain some mature trees and to create a focal space with a playground and steps down to the water. The dwellings are flats that vary in size from one to three bedrooms, those on upper floors being reached by two kinds of external staircase.(1) One type is a dog-leg stair set in the gaps between the blocks where they change angle, therefore not only responding to the site but also taking advantage of the suggested rotation. These stairs lead to entrances at both upper levels on the spine of the block. The other kind of stair occurs within the block, placed in a narrow gap between two units, and runs in a linear manner right to the top feeding flats on both sides. The placing of large flats on the two upper floors and small ones on the ground minimises the number of stairs required. The elements are cleverly juggled together.

The complex and intriguing external profile develops from the access stairs and generous provision of balconies, which are both projected out and cut back. As in earlier work, the outer cladding is mainly render on load-bearing blocks, but corner kitchens on secondary frames are clad in sheet metal. An interesting innovation is the use of Profilit glass panels for the living-rooms, translucent but not transparent. This provides plenty of daylight with the view restricted to the central opening doors, so the tenants are not excessively exposed on the public side. At night the rooms, lit from within, turn into glowing towers.

The competition jury was impressed by the economy of the scheme and by the sheer amount of accommodation provided. The density is certainly helped by the deep plan, but at the price of some blind bathrooms and kitchens that look across the shared stair at each other rather too closely. Slit-like horizontal windows reduce exposure, and perhaps the visual contact will promote neighbourliness, but one can also imagine the opposite.(2)

The planned public space by the river promises to be a generous and effective focus. Earlier spaces of this kind in the architects' work set an encouraging precedent but we shall have to await the completion of the other two-thirds of the scheme to see the effect, and properly to appreciate the exploitation of context which should prove one of this development's greatest strengths.