Office Building — Studio Andreas Lechner · Architect · Associate Professor

OFFICE BLDG.

︎︎︎Offices for a steel construction firm in Gratkorn-Friesach, Greater Graz, 2012

For a mid-sized steel construction firm north of Graz, this building unites three fully independent office units within a single, clearly articulated volume. Conceived as a composition of three interlocking rectangular blocks, two form an L-shaped base that shields the ground floor from the street, while a third block cantilevers above, creating a sheltered forecourt at the entrance.

Inside, subtle level changes distinguish open-plan work areas, generous meeting zones, and continuous vistas over the surrounding semi-rural landscape. A landscaped perimeter mediates between building and terrain, with a planting design by Marie Theres Stabinger, softening the transition from industrial premises to agricultural edge.

Fig. Design diagram – 3 independent office units in one building

The façade rejects conventional window articulation, instead reinforcing the building’s horizontal emphasis through nuanced shifts in volume and material: closed end walls clad in trapezoidal stainless-steel shingles; street-facing elevations in aluminium panels; the cantilevered upper volume in horizontal corrugated aluminium; and courtyard façades in vertical corrugations — echoing the established vocabulary of both the owner’s business and the site’s premises.

Somewhere between Villa Dall’ava (and drunken pilotis), an unexpected garden pocket in an industrial yard, and a dash of glitz in the peri-urban mosaic of old farmsteads and newer single-family houses, the building asserts itself as a quietly playful insertion into a heterogeneous landscape — and operates almost entirely energy self-sufficiently.

By interrogating the relationship between utilitarian construction, typological autonomy, and landscape integration, the building frames the periphery as a site for contemporary architecture—situated between self-irony and functional rationality, and resisting definition as either purely industrial or purely representational.

Office building for a steel construction firm in Greater Graz, 2011-2012
in collaboration with Leitner Planung und Consulting GmBH

Architecture: Andreas Lechner
Fotos: © Krischner Oberhofer
Fotos construction phase: © Andreas Lechner