architek[tour] tirol – guide to architecture in tyrol

In a listed house going back to the Gothic period, Schlögl & Süß Architekten realized a new shop for the Swarovski Crystal Worlds. Changes were hardly made on the outside, but the inside was completely restructured and newly designed. Visitors are guided in a one-way system through a sequence of rooms staged by Swarovski in which the new interior architecture and the historic building fabric are contraposed.

With the Hypo Tyrol Bank Headquarters on the Boznerplatz, a further regional bank has set new architectural trends in the town centre. The transparent building with its vertical slat covering matches the height of the surrounding buildings. With a slight bend at the corner it follows the course of the road and, towards the top of the building it develops into a top floor full of character with a glazed conference room.

All emergency calls in the region are to – or should – arrive here, and the ILL Centre then coordinates the necessary efforts of the various bodies of assistance, firefighters, ambulance services and the like. The design of the centre strives to underline this highly important function. Four concrete panels, and a central staircase, balance a sweeping and hovering oblong structure, stretching over an impressive span, which gives the firefighters’ vehicles enough room below to move in and out of their garages and, at the same time, creates a "roofed-in” exterior space.

The stations originally designed in the late 1920s by Franz Baumann certainly are some of the most important monuments of modernism in Tyrol. In the course of a technological upgrade of the cable railway, the stations had inevitably to be adapted both functionally and spatially. All the necessary interventions, however, were developed strictly along the lines of either severely restoring the original building as designed by Baumann, thus cancelling all later additions, or ostentatiously showing contemporary additions to be just that: changes added because they were necessary.

Amidst architecturally heterogeneous buildings, the Isser optician’s shop creates a space for the eyes to rest. Almost unimpaired, passers-by can look into the show and sales area and concentrate on the goods presented there, since the purist design refrains from distracting their attention.