Pushing the Limits of Architecture:
Delugan Meissl Associates Architects
After ten successful years of architectural design, Delugan Meissl are aspiring to new heights in their field. After gaining extensive experience in building subsidised housing, determining the elasticity of the most rigid conditions, in other words the attempt to turn quality limitations on their heads, they are now confronted with a project of a greater dimension.
The second of February of this year will go down in the history of the office as legendary. This was the day Delugan Meissl found out that they had won the competition for the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart. And just hours later they got word that they would be building the FH Campus in Vienna as well. This was a quantum leap for this team of all-rounders that has little hierarchical structure and is made up of Dietmar Feistel, Martin Josst and Christopher Schweiger, who became associates this year, in addition to Roman and Elke Delugan-Meissl.
Their basic approach, their attitude toward architecture remains unaltered from project to project. Their intensity, their philosophy of testing the waters and pushing the envelope of architectural creation is what drives them. Mentally grasping space as actual space, in all the qualities of its three-dimensionality and not just as the sum of its square metres propels their architecture to new heights, be it for subsidised housing or the Porsche Arena.
Pushing architecture to perfection – that is what Delugan Meissl proved they could do above the rooftops of Vienna in their own flat, which became their much vaunted "turning point" in the media in 2003.
For the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart, they decided to depart from the usual standard-equipment museum, opting instead for a spiral pathway recreating the dynamic visual impact of an arena. It is as if you were looking at it from the bottom of a funnel, watching the space unfold before your eyes. For this team of architects, a formal allusion to the Porsche icon would have missed the real message by a mile. But in terms of substance, key points of reference can be detected, in speed, mobility, dynamic momentum, movement and how these ideas can be expressed through architecture.
The FH Campus Vienna Altes Landgut is to be located on what was once farmland, surrounded by a divergent urban landscape: a highway junction, a meadow, housing blocks and a view of the mountains. Two buckled structural elements sit on a base, using the outlying access zones to make a connection to the landscape, and are internally organised so as to permit their flexible use by the various departments, interspersed with administrative units. Sports facilities and car-parks were also part of the architectural plan. A restaurant located at the highest point celebrates the view of the landscape, opening up to the eye an expanse of space extending all the way to the mountains forming the backdrop of this scenery. Delugan Meissl work with what is already there, pushing economies to the limit and producing architecture that tests the boundaries of what is possible.
(by Elke Krasny)
