Steiner Architecture f/f . photos: © Florian Holzherr
Submitting a flat roof in Austria is to go looking for trouble. It’s a known neighborly solecism, a breach of good manners.
We tried and we lost, for old Salzburg’s suburbs were not going to be the exception to this unwritten rule of architectural style. Thus our initial plans for this private clinic, with a long flat roof, were passionately rejected, and the statutory gabled roof was constructed instead.
The result is still a little raffish. It fulfills its responsibility to the neighborhood, with which is just about shares a vocabulary, while remaining slightly insouciant towards it. The building feels warehouseish, slightly vapid from certain angles. Undemonstrative here and there. One of the facades looks like a toy face with a winking eye. On the opposite side the staircase suggests teeth.
Red insulating concrete dominates the composition. It pushes the technology of reusable concrete further. But it also provokes its notably cautious and unadventurous architectural surrounding with its cheeky hue and rough finish maculated with stains, holes and traces of wooden formwork.
Known in German as Dämmbeton, insulating concrete has a certain degree of breathability. It changes colours subtly depending on air humidity, in addition to every material’s common response to varying seasonal sunlight. And so the building seems to change moods constantly.
Though the project is composed of two recognizable volumes articulated by a circular reception hall, it is in fact divided top-bottom, rather than left-right. The whole ground floor is the clinic for patients with respiratory illnesses, and the whole first floor is given to two apartment units.
The two main volumes are not identical. One is larger than the other, the window shape and placement is similar but not the same. On one the staircase to the apartment above is straight, on the other the staircase is spiral.
The circle-shaped, glass-walled reception articulates the clinic on the ground floor. It’s a deliberate move to scale down the building, and offers a contrast to the heavy red concrete, and a break in the serrated roofline.
But the red concrete slithers into the chiefly off-white and pastel halls and consulting rooms of the clinic through the roof. It’s a leitmotif. It reminds one of the heavy hull, of porosity, of things slightly (more) primitive, in the face of the chirurgical cleanliness of modern hospitals.
Upstairs in the apartment units one gets the peaceful ambience of off-whites and pastels, but without the anxiety of medical procedures. Now it’s a kitchen island, not an operating table.
Here the views are more expansive, the natural light vaster. And through the openings, on the extra thick window reveals, the ever present red concrete.
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