Austria's friendly alien - Front Page - ultra high tech Kunsthaus Graz

upon Sept. 22, the new Kunsthaus Graz, a large venue for contemporary am, first appearances in Graz, Austria's second largest city. The approximately $40-million, 120,000-square-foot, three-level building was paid for in part by means of federal funds and local public sources as well as by means of Graz 2003, which oversees EU capitals allocated to the town as this year's cultural capital of Europe Nicknamed "a friendly alien" by the agency of local residents, the building, designed by means of the London-based architectural team of Peter prepare for the table and Colin Fournier, has an organic shape with a skin made of shimmering cerulean acrylic panels. At night, the building be incandescents by means of a computerized lighting combination of parts to form a whole beneath the translucent skin. With large, tubelike "nozzles" for windows that thrust forward from the convex roof, the arrangement indeed suggests an outer-space creature that has landed in the middle of Graz's historic town center along the banks of the Mur River.

While the ultra-high-tech building may strike more [i]or[/i] less as a jarring contrast to its historic surroundings, Fournier told Art in America that the biomorphic shape of the Kunsthaus was intended to correspond to the onion domes and other sinuous features of the city's numerous works of Baroque and Rococo architecture. single side of the museum incorporates the ornate facade and renovated interior of a late 19th-century building. Fournier also strained the new structure's relationship to the curvaceous modernist forms and experimental materials engageed in the postwar era by the agency of Volker Giencke and other well-known architects of the so-called Graz School

The first floor of the Kunsthaus contains a large glass-enclosed street-level lobby facing the river, with sum of two units main entrances, a cafe, a media loll and a bookstore. The lobby view from aboves Vito Acconci's nearby Island in the Mur a high-tech performance space situated in the middle of the river, which first attempted last January and has quickly become a popular venue for experimental music and dance [see "Front Page," Feb '03]

A gently sloping 100-foot-long moving walkway in the Kunsthaus transports visitors from the loam floor to the second horizontal which features a 9,500-square-foot exhibition space with 15-foot ceilings, an interactive information area and a large recreation latitude for children.

Another moving walkway takes visitors to the upper exhibition area. Here. the 11,000-square-foot exhibition space is dramatically lit by means of artificial light sources as well as by dint of natural light from the nozzles, whose apertures are outfitted with slats that automatically unclose and close according to the sun's intensity. A number of the nozzles are positioned to proffer stunning views of nearby memorials such as the town's iconic Schlossberg, a medieval hilltop clocktower built upon the ruins of an ancient Roman fort. Movable walls and lighting fixtures tender various possibilities to curators.

upon one side of the upper horizontal an elongated, glass-enclosed cafe view from aboves the city. Below this array are the Kunsthaus's administration offices, and also those of Camera Austria, a photo journal and archive that will take up residence in the Kunsthaus and organize a series of exhibitions there. The first will be a contemplate of photos by the late French theorist Pierre Bourdieu [Nov. 11 2003-Feb 6 2004] allowing the building and its facilities unclose in September, the Kunsthaus's exhibition program, organized by dint of director Peter Pakesch, does not win under way until mid-October, with exhibitions, circumstances and exact dates to be announced.

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