House without Qualities 2

The former building of an insurance company in Vienna was used as a model to explore options for reusing reinforced concrete skeleton buildings dating back to post-war modernism. The fabric of the city was considered as a three-dimensional building lot.

Approach:
1. A used office building is stripped down to its reinforced concrete structure: Slabs, cores, columns.
2. contrary to the horizontal layering of the storey slabs, a vertical open space is cut through the storey ceilings.
3. the existing building is largely closed off spatially and climatically from the open space by semi-permeable membranes.
4. the skins are permeable to certain spatial particles (transistors).
5. these transit capsules are intermediate spaces, threshold spaces that belong neither to one area (stock) nor to the other (open space). As “no-man's-spaces” they are (functionally) empty and featureless. The skin itself forms sluices, so to speak, that question the boundaries of ownership, power and buildings.
6 The open space, the ravine, functions like a vertical park: the defining elements are a complex, space-forming pathway and the surface of the (nutrient) soil (= the walls) itself.
7. it is important that it can be accessed independently of the building, with its own access, which develops parasitically under/behind/in the skin of the existing building and, like the ravine, is available to the public 24 hours a day. (Outdoor space!)

MW
30.11.1998