Description

The Reininghaus district lies just 5 km from the Schlossberg in the centre of Graz and is at 54 hectares one of the largest urban development areas in Austria. The housing development by SPS Architekten on the site of the former Hummelkaserne barracks marks not only the long-awaited start to the development of Graz’s largest urban development in years, but is also the first six-storey timber building in Styria.

The Reininghaus brothers built the first steam-powered brewery in Styria on the site in 1855 and continued brewing beer until 1944. The brewery was badly damaged during the Second World War and has been largely abandoned ever since. After many unsuccessful attempts, the brewery site was divided into separate plots which were then sold individually. The city of Graz secured several key plots of land, including the site in Reininghaus-Süd where the former Hummelkaserne barracks stood. Development rights were then conferred to the non-profit property developers EN, who began by building the “Peter Rosegger” nursing home (Dietger Wissounig Architects). With its timber façade and large-format windows, it signalled their creative and ecological ambitions. For the ENW housing development next door, the developers decided to use timber right from the start. In 2012, a competition followed for a housing development on the Hummelkaserne site, aimed specifically at joint ventures between architects and timber construction companies. A plan for the urban arrangement of the buildings already existed.

The competition winners SPS Architekten and Kaufmann Bausysteme largely adhered to this specification and proposed four identical six-storey buildings mirrored about a central axis. According to the architects, the open placement of the buildings on the site was motivated by the idea of the outdoor space as an open continuum. There are no fences to the neighbouring nursing home, which has worked out well despite initial scepticism.

The logic of the timber construction can be seen in the calm serial repetition of the buildings with a few carefully placed variations. The cross-laminated timber façade elements were prefabricated by Kaufmann Bausysteme in Styria complete with windows and blinds and hoisted into position on site in a short span of time. The façade is clad with vertical strips of ventilated larch siding. The need to include adequate fire blocks, which in housing projects frequently entails convoluted solutions, has been combined here with a design element: the line of the balconies that span the entire breadth of the west elevation (and are generously-dimensioned for publicly-subsidised housing) continues around the remaining façades as a horizontal line of metal flashing that divides the sections of larch cladding.

The apartments face west, with a view of the Styrian mountains. A partially covered central axis runs east-west through the site and acts as a central meeting area. In the blocks, the concrete stairs have been left as exposed concrete with small touches of colour adding variety to the otherwise general sense of material honesty. Within the apartments, however, the wooden construction is barely noticeable due to plasterboard lining; exposed solid timber walls are, it seems, still too much of an imposition on tenants – at least for the time being as the EGW’s next housing project in Graz is planned to be made of wood inside and out.

The 92 apartments were occupied in 2016 with the city of Graz making them available for lower-income tenants. The structural limitations of timber construction and the savings achieved through prefabrication have made it possible to be more generous in the interiors and communal facilities than is normally the case for publicly-subsidised housing. In addition, residents can look forward to lower heating costs thanks to the buildings’ passive house energy standard. The hope is that the remaining developments in Reininghaus will maintain this promising standard in the future.

Originally published in Bauwelt 20.2017, pp. 38-43, abridged and edited for Building Types online, translated by Julian Reisenberger

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