JOANNEUMSVIERTEL

The ground surface, the horizontal platform on which most of our movements in the city occur, is very rarely the generating argument or the spatial support of a project. Perhaps as a result of that yearning for an identity, which every new intervention seems to demand, architecture has tended to express itself throughout history by means of objects, volumes that have often established a difficult relationship with the scale of the urban environment in which they were inserted. In contrast, the expansion of the Joanneum Museum emerged from the intention of acting within the strict limits of the horizontal plane of the city, offering a new public space based on an architectural proposal that is paradoxically simple in its depth and complex in its surface.
The Joanneumsviertel of Graz is comprised of three buildings from different periods and with different functions that up to now have had their backs turned toward one another and faced a residual rear courtyard: the Museum of Natural History from the eighteenth century; the Regional Library of Styria; and the New Gallery of Contemporary Art, built at the end of the nineteenth century. Addressing each of these organisms belonging to the same institution, the project emerged from the need to endow the complex with a common means of access, welcoming spaces, a conference hall, reading areas and services, along with a lower level for archives and storage. Instead of giving in to the temptation of developing an iconic intervention, as has often happened in recent museum expansions, however, the project offered a unique opportunity to carry out an at once urban and architectural transformation. Whereas the historic center of Graz is known for its expressive “roofscape,” our proposal developed entirely below ground: we simply defined a new pavement that, like a large carpet, takes up the entire exterior space between the buildings and conceals below ground those spaces housing the required program. This decision acknowledges the value of the existing historical construction carrying out a renovation that respects their architectural characteristics- and thus acts only selectively in some interior areas, without affecting the original exterior image and volume. The horizontal, continuous surface of the new square is marked by a combined series of conical patios that bring natural light into the underground spaces and house the entrance, the lobby, and the areas shared by the museums and the library, a gathering place from which to reach each of them.

The geometric abstraction implicit in every architectural work appears in the proposal with the boldness of a contemporary installation in the public space, transformed into an apparently random sequence of conical intersections derived from a single, virtual three dimensional figure. Curved glass surfaces with a continuous silk screen print filter light toward the interior and, inversely, illuminate the square with artificial light at night. A cultural institution like the Joanneum Museum, on which the Kunsthaus Graz is dependent, thus expresses the changing relationship between art and city. The square that centralizes the access to the museums is an unusual intervention in the urban space: it champions the interaction between the plastic arts and architecture and will incorporate specific installations in collaboration with contemporary artists. The new expansion goes almost unnoticed, concealed beneath the pavement connecting the historical buildings, like a materialization of a perforated horizon that expresses and not just literally- that the depth of an architectural work can reside, unexpectedly, on its surface.

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