Panaghias Marmariotissis 16, 15232 Athens, Greece
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RATHAUSPARK
VIENNA - mentioned
Between Urban Landscape and Infrastructure The Rathauspark is an important green space of the historical city centre of Vienna and under UNESCO protection. The proposed shed for the municipal gardeners is on the one hand a built urban infrastructure -in Otto Wagner’s sense- and on the other, an integral part of the urban landscape. The programmatic and spatial requirements of the competition brief led us to the organization of the building with pragmatic yet opposing criteria: light-dark, warm-cool, outside-inside, open-closed. Natural metaphors like ‘trunk and crown’, ‘core and envelope’ define and characterize the proposed building which aspires to be part of the surrounding landscape and tries to avoid an architectural dependency to the urban context of the Ringstrasse. The devised open and layered arrangement permits a flexible and simple use of the building. The outdoor maintenance area, circumscribed by a hedge, is the first layer of the compound as well as the public access to the building. From the outside to the inside, the workspace and equipment storage forms the first layer, flexibly separated from the outdoor maintenance area through a translucent foldable wall. The compact second zone, flooded with natural light, accommodates all the ‘private’ uses i.e. offices, kitchen, washrooms, storage. The atrium in the buildings’ core -a retreat area for the gardeners- opens to the sky and city through a generous skylight. Through the atrium one has access to the changing and wash rooms below. The building’s sustainable constructional and organizational approach respects the urban ecology aiming at becoming an integral part of this important urban space.