Kunsthaus Graz: You sexy thing

It’s like image from a 1950s sci-fi film. The setting is the sleepy, traditional Austrian town of Graz, all narrow winding streets and terracotta-tiled, double-pitched roofs. And the alien is a deep-sea monster the size of a city block that hovers a few metres above ground level, looking set to devour everything in its path. Shaped like a giant bladder, it is wrapped in a shiny blue skin with pulsating phosphorescent scales. Instead of gills, rows of slanting spouts erupt along its back.

Despite appearances, the intruder is no creature from the black lagoon. It is the £23m Kunsthaus Graz, a modern art gallery for Austria’s second city, which is this year’s European capital of culture. Little wonder that the building, which opens later this month, has been universally dubbed “a friendly alien”. It is Austria’s answer to Birmingham’s new silvery-scaled Selfridges department store – though quite a few degrees more bizarre, inside and out, and with a sharper technological cutting edge.

The Kunsthaus is also designed by a British architect. In fact, it is the only major completed building accredited to Peter Cook, professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture and leader of the Archigram group, which flowered in the 1960s. (Though long defunct, Archigram’s enduring influence was recognised with the award of a Royal Gold Medal last year.) To be more precise, the Kunsthaus was designed by Cook’s protégé Colin Fournier, a fellow Bartlett professor. After winning an international design competition for the project in 2000, the two designers formed an architectural practice, Spacelab, to carry out the project.

Whether designed by Cook or Fournier, the Kunsthaus is nevertheless in the spirit of Archigram and the late Cedric Price, who dreamed up sexy, jokey, science-fiction projects like the Walking City that hint at social and technological possibilities over the horizon. And long before the cult of zoomorphism, sparked by the freeform possibilities of computer-aided design, the two architects pursued a fascination for what they call the “animal presence in architecture”. Fournier presents the biomorphic elements of the Kunsthaus like characters in a storybook with their own nicknames – nozzles, belly, skin, needle and pin.

If the outrageous, bladder-like form of the Kunsthaus looks self-indulgent, that is because Fournier intended it to be just that. The gallery has no permanent collection to cater for, and its responsibilities are purely towards changing exhibitions and installations of contemporary art. Fournier observes: “It has, in effect, no substance – its contents remain a mystery.” In other words, he regards the building’s gallery spaces as “a black box of hidden tricks to be left in the hands of various curators.”

Freed from the obligation to fit its form to any particular function, Fournier argues that the design had two options.

It could either follow the functionalist tradition and “adopt the self-effacing stance of the well-serviced, anonymous shed”, Or it could go the way of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and develop a “highly idiosyncratic form of its own and playfully celebrate its own iconic image”.

There are no prizes for guessing which option Fournier went for, moulding the Kunsthaus into a giant walk-through modern art object in its own right. Its bizarre bulging form leaves visitors dumbfounded. And its skin is an avant-garde work of art in its own right, and a tribute to cutting-edge technology. It is made of acrylic panels that are smooth, glossy, clear, blue-tinted and precisely moulded to hug the curving shell beneath. This synthetic skin is as sexy as a silk stocking.

Visitors enter through a cast-iron building that fronts the approach road to one of the city’s four main bridges. This narrow three-storey structure is a wonder of early industrialised construction, and is justifiably a protected building. It was Austria’s first cast-iron building, and its facade, complete with exquisite gothic ornamentation was another English import, cast in sections in Sheffield in 1842. The building has been simply restored with a plain modern interior as the gallery’s foyer and ticket hall.

Visitors then proceed through the cast-iron building to be confronted by the huge blue bladder structure – or “belly”, in Fournier’s parlance – hovering overhead. Its shiny blue transparent outer skin of acrylic panels curve round without interruption beneath its underbelly, which forms the ground-floor ceiling.

The ground floor itself is a quasi-outdoor space enclosed by clear-glazed window wall. It contains a multipurpose events space and a cafe that spills out on to a terrace overlooking the river.

The centrepiece of the ground floor is a sloping travelator, which Fournier dubs the “pin”. As in a fairground mystery ride, anticipation rises as visitors are conveyed noiselessly upwards to pierce the enigmatic belly. The first floor, which contains a children’s gallery reached by a separate staircase, is traversed in an opaque tunnel. The journey continues to the second floor, one of the two main exhibition galleries, from where another trip on a second sloping travelator brings you into the main gallery on the top floor.

The upper gallery is an awesome, column-free cavern beneath the vaulted roof of the belly. Unlike the hall below, it is naturally lit by the 15 slanting, cylindrical spouts, or “nozzles”, that erupt from the roof surface. These are effectively northlight “spots”, as conventional continuous northlights would have been ruled out by the irregular belly shape of the roof.

The curving surface of the roof is lined with an inner skin of metal mesh panels that tuck into the nozzles, which are themselves picked out in lurid fluorescent colours. The overall effect in the cavernous space is that of an oversized discotheque.

The final element in the building is the “needle”, an elongated viewing gallery cantilevering out from the belly and providing a stunning panorama of the city, its river and the castle hill. In contrast to the arty biomorphism of the belly, the needle plays it straight with its regular geometry and plain curtain walling.

The show-stealing belly itself is animated by its cladding, which is a mixture of cutting-edge technology and Archigram’s sense of humour. The smooth acrylic outer skin is transparent to allow it to pass seamlessly over the windows of the belly’s two lower floors, where the blue tinting is omitted. Another reason for the transparency is that it reveals an even more bizarre second skin below. This consists of 925 circular fluorescent lightbulbs that glow at night like the bioluminescent scales of a deep-sea creature. Fournier regards these lights as pixels that together make up an intelligent skin or huge electronic screen, across which text, patterns and moving images can be played.

In Urban Design terms, the outlandish new building is blatantly at odds with the surrounding cityscape. The fact that Graz boasts one of largest intact historic city centres and is designated a world heritage site only makes the contrast of old and new all the more shocking and provocative.

The big question is whether the alien intruder is as friendly as the city council and its architects hoped – or whether this vast, curvaceous structure in its overtly synthetic skin is a predator that threatens the homogeneous cityscape of rectilinear, pitched-roof buildings in beige stucco and terracotta tiles.

Despite its alien origins, the new building does observe some fundamental urban design rules. It rises no higher than the neighbouring five-storey buildings, and its fluid amoeba-like form fits snugly in the irregular plot between adjoining buildings. As for those rooftop nozzles that cock a snook at the demure pitched roofs around it, aren’t they just replying to the flamboyantly curvy onion domes of the neighbouring baroque church?

Where the scheme begins to lose its sure touch is in the disparate mix of building elements and styles. The inclusion of the neo-gothic, 19th-century cast-iron building and the curtain-walled needle of the upper viewing gallery was intended to set up dialogues between old and new, conventional and avant-garde. But these dialogues would have been much more forceful if the huge, curvy, shiny alien could float freely without tethers, rather than being brought down to earth.

Ultimately, though, Graz has procured one of the most exciting new buildings of the last decade. Its provocatively exhibitionist form accurately advertises its function in exhibiting avant-garde art. Whether friendly or predatory, a sexy new breed or an evolutionary hybrid, it will ensure Graz stays on the culture map long after 2003.