Emergence: Morphogenetic Design Strategies

Building Profile

View from the Schlössberg. In form and material the Kunsthaus may be an alien presence, but it also seems an appropriate and welcome one.

For the Austrian city of Graz, Peter Cook and Colin Fournier have created a contemporary art centre with an ‘amorphic, perimeter-hugging form’ that has already been dubbed by locals ’the friendly alien’. Jeremy Melvin explains how the drama of the Kunsthaus befits not only its 19th-century context but also its task as a gallery space that incites interaction.

Site plan.

Like most of Austria, Graz – Europe’s cultural capital for 2003 – is polite and wears its uniforms well. The principal difference is that here the uniforms are not just splendid scenery and gorgeous relics of an imperial past, though it certainly does have a wonderful natural setting, ringed by peaks with the River Mur running through a gorge deep enough to prevent melting snow flooding the city, and its very own captive mountain, the Schlössberg, which as its name suggests was forced into subservience when a castle was built on its summit. Its sunlight, casting intricate detail on the traditional buildings into sharp relief, is such that you realise you are within spitting distance of Italy, but a glimpse of the Hotel Weisler, designed by a pupil of Otto Wagner, ...