Hypo Alpe-Adria Center

The building integrates inherent complexities at the shifting border between rural and urban typologies; its form emanates from both the pre-Alpine contoured landscape and the narrow, twisting passages and plazas of a small village. The Center is located just east of Klagenfurt, Austria, where the city extends into its outlying suburban and agricultural regions. As with many contemporary edge-city conditions, the site is surrounded by dislocated buildings, open parking areas, large-scale commercial developments, and residential suburbs.

photography by © Ernst Peter Prokop

The sloping, sharply folded roof creates a conceptual landscape, while the low-rise building component emerges from the ground as reconfigured earth. Like the seismic shifting of tectonic plates, the five-story bank headquarters juts out of the earthbound lower form.

The center’s separate volumes intersect around a central courtyard, which allows light to permeate the branch bank on the ground floor. Bridges at each floor link the elevator core and lobbies along the edge of the courtyard with the larger building mass, and continue out to puncture the facade and create balconies overlooking the city streets.

photography by © HYPO Alpe Adria Bank

Pedestrian pathways are an extension of the existing peripheral streets: the intersecting cardo and decumanus axes carve into the building conglomeration. At the southern end of the decumanus, a large canopy connects the public forum space directly to the busy Volkermarkt Strasse intersection, inviting the public into the events center and bank branch.

At the northern section of the site, open gardens, commercial and office space, and the kindergarten transition into the neighboring low-density suburban residential zone. Both program (typology) and form (topography) re-define the role of Hypo bank, to become a major cultural and civic institution.

photography by © Ernst Peter Prokop

Project Info
Architects: Morphosis Architects
Location: Carinthia, Austria
Client: Karntner Landes-und-Hypothekenbank
Project Manager: John Enright, Silvia Kuhle
Project Team: Dave Grant, Martin Krammer, Fabian Kremkus, Ung-Joo Scott Lee, Jean Oei, David Plotkin, David Rindlaub, Robyn Sambo, Stephen Slaughter, Brandon Welling, Eui-Sung Yi
Structural Engineer: Dipl. Ing. Klaus Gelbmann
Mechanical Engineer: Ing. Klaus Gruber GmbH
Contractor: Wrulich, Elin Ebg, Pfrimer and Mosslacher, Steiner Bau, GmbH, Stahlbau Pichler GmbH SRL, Ing. Klaus Gruber GmbH, Arge Starmann-Sauritschnig, Eder Blechbau, Mossler GmbH, WKS Isoliergesellschaft GmbH, AllMetall
Size: 250,000 ft² / 23,226 m²
Site: 2.0 acres / 0.81 hectares
Year: 2002
Type: Office building