Carinthian gateway - design of the House of Carinthian Physicians building in Austria

Architectural Review, The, April, 1996 by Peter Blundell Jones

The Carinthian medical society has built itself a new headquarters which makes an important contribution to the urban fabric of Klagenfurt while offering its users a varied series of internal spaces designed with great care to avoid being institutional.

The Chamber of Medicine for the Land of Carinthia in southern Austria decided to build itself a new headquarters close to the main hospital in the regional capital, Klagenfurt. It was to contain offices, surgeries, and a large room for board meetings and lectures. Financed by the medical pension fund and with some of its built area rented out, it was seen both as an investment and as a prestigious gesture. An influential doctor who had also trained as an architect persuaded his colleagues of the need for a good design, so an architectural competition was held in 1990, the first in that region for some time.

Ernst Giselbrecht, one of the leading Graz architects whose work we have published before (AR January 1994, pp52-57; October 1995, pp52-57 and pp79-81) was the only non-Carinthian included in the second stage, but his project took first prize. It was completed in 1994. With its horizontal emphasis, flat roofs, technical precision and white metallic cladding, it seems at first very similar to his other buildings. Even the sun-shading devices recall those on his technical college in Kaindorf. A closer look reveals however, that the formal similarities mask a dissimilarity in contextual response, both buildings being site-specific, and this one decidedly urban.

The House of Carinthian Physicians stands on the east side of the main road leading northward from Klagenfurt towards St Veit, at a corner and on a slight curve. This is the point at which the old stone wall - parts of which are still there - once divided the city from the fields. The building therefore marks the site of an old gate, and it still makes a symbolic gateway to the inner city. Four storeys was the planning limit for the neighbourhood, and the programme required large numbers of individual offices which could most easily be arranged in linear wings. Giselbrecht decided to create two tracts with a broad space between for services and communications, using the most prestigious elements to generate a special corner. To animate the street, the ground floor on the urban side would be filled with shops, bank and a cafe, set between the columns in plan-libre manner. The public would also be brought through the building by an arcade-like passage.

The dominant planning grid follows the eastern site boundary -and it is also perpendicular to Krassingstrasse, the street to the north. This arrangement leaves an expanding space fronting St Veiter Strasse where the linear office wing can give way to the curved corner block, which becomes deeper in plan to accommodate the boardroom. This departure from the right-angle is balanced by another on the opposite corner of the building where the south-eastern tail of the office wing swings into the garden. The rounded corner block is a powerful gesture visible up and down the street, but its concavity also points back into the building, creating an added impression of depth. The drama is increased by a special silicone-jointed curtain wall in continuous glass, fritted around the openings, the white ceramic coating on its back face gaining a greenish tinge in contrast with the pure white enamelled steel panels elsewhere. The coating makes the glass opaque over mullions and partitions, and also articulates the arrangement of the accommodation.

The curved corner block is disengaged from the rest of the building and its back wall is skewed, creating gaps in the front and end of the building, which are linked on the ground floor by the open passage already described. The gap on the west side occurs directly opposite the main staircase, and is made more prominent by being open two clear storeys under the linking balconies. The open north end reveals the ends of office passages protected by a three-storey glass block wall which continues inside, the interior made external. It is a clever choice at this point, for contrast with the metal clad east front of the offices - the other side of the same wing - could hardly be stronger, yet translucency as opposed to transparency also detaches it from the openness of the central circulation, the intended visual gap in the end of the building.

The geometrical manipulations of the plan are strongly felt in the street-like central spaces, which are lively, easily navigable, shaped in sympathy with circulation flow, and animated with frequent views to one side or other. The building is very forcefully layered between floor slabs, however, with only one relatively narrow void penetrating from one level to the next. This is well placed next to the staircase, but it does not give much sense of vertical continuity unless you stand right in it. The best moment in the internal circulation is the stair from second to third floor with daylight pouring in from the glazed roof above, another strongly articulated element.