COURTHOUSE ST.PÖLTEN

Competition 1st Prize, general planning commission

Location: St.Pölten, Austria

Program: Courthouse, Office, Square

Status: Completion 2010

Size: 2.617 m2

Budget: 8 M € (including square and garage)

Client: BIG Bundesimmobiliengesellschaft m.b.H., Bundesministerium für Justiz

Architecture: Christian Kronaus, Erhard An-He Kinzelbach

Team: Sigrid Müller-Welt, Lukas Staudinger, Manuela Wind, Jakub Smagacz

General planner: ARGE Vasko+Partner Engineers and Kronaus Kinzelbach Architects

Consultants: Virtual DynamiX/ Michael Lisner (Visualisation), Ing. Purker (Fire code consultant), Prof. Würger (Soil consultant)

The courthouse St. Pölten (Lower-Austria) asked for a building extension to house the higher regional court, district court and the state proscecutor’s office. In addition, it required a redesign of the representative public square in front of the historic courthouse building with a new parking garage underneath.

The historic courthouse is a landmarked building with three floors. A key challenge in the design of the extension was to find a solution that would respect the historical context and coherently connect old and new while, at the same time, treating the new building as a structure in its own right, rather than as a mere annex. The mediation between old and new was expected to function not only in formal terms but also on a spatial and organizational level. In particular, it was necessary to develop a system that would efficiently connect the three storeys in the courthouse building with the five storeys in the new building while, at the same time, mediating between the different ceiling heights.

The new design of the square in front of the historic building was meant to replace a previously hardly used forecourt, offering the city a new, attractive and programmed public space of urban quality and intensity.

SERVED AND SERVING PROGRAM:

The program of the extension building is divided into serving and served rooms. As a result, the building is composed of 2 distinct volumes, one holding the served spaces, offices and library, one holding all serving functions, as stair, elevator, bathrooms, server rooms and vertical shafts. The former has all flexibility, not least due to a exosceletal structure with a minimum of internal columns and non-bearing parition walls, while the latter connects and mediates between the old and the new building.

The central corridor and the offices are divided by a performative, folded wall. It does not only separate spaces, but provides built-in file cabinets and closets for the office interiors, while adding value to the functional corridor by creating waiting and meeting areas in front of the office doors with integral benches and direct and indirect lighting fixtures.

MASKING FACADE:

In its function as interface between inside and outside, between building and city, the façade plays a key role in bridging the dichotomies between tabula rasa and contextualization as well as between unity and distinctiveness. The façade operates as spatial organization that allows local differentiation in a coherent whole. In the design solution developed for the extension of the courthouse in St. Pölten, the façade is used as a central means to organize and zone the interior, to shape programme and to evoke atmosphere and affect.

Accordingly, the perforated and grooved façade of the extension building seeks not only to address the discrepancy between the number and height of storeys in the two buildings but also to accommodate – and enhance – the functionality of the new office building. The coherent application of the Aluminium-Copper facade integrates two factors: the horizontal grooving extends existing lining in the façade of the historic building and enriches it with additional lines that denote the storeys in the new building; and an irregular perforation with windows of two different sizes. As a result of the grooving and the abandonment of the traditional window format, the difference in storey structure is veiled and the new extension is formally connected with the historic building. At the same time, the façade articulates and engenders independent identity. From the inside, the perforation of the façade provides for a multiplication of illumination and vista: instead of conventional window positions, the facade offers overhead lights, desk-level lights and floor-level lights. These three different openings direct the view in unconventinal ways while ensuring sufficient light and convenient look-outs for the office staff.

The golden material gives the new façade an associated and yet distinctive colour – it functions as a modern and classy interpretation of the yellow color of the historic building. The building is a concrete construction with an insulated and ventilated TECU-Gold cladding. The technical challenge lied in the detailing of the numerous horizontal grooves, the continuous folding of the panels adjacent to the windows and the oblique window soffits, whose distribution across the facade makes the punch-hole facade partly disappear.

The material’s characteristic gloss and brilliance does not only grant the building a warm and pleasant character, but transforms continuously in the course of day and following seasonal changes. The building literally becomes alive.