General Chat / Kunsthaus Graz

So I have this math project in which we have to find buildings with specific geometrical features. One such feature is an inclinded cylinder, so I thought of Kunsthaus Graz. I had heard about the building before but didn't know a whole lot about it. In my research though, I found some very cool features of the building. Here's a description I put together for the project:





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Often refered to as the ‘friendly alien,’ Kunthaus Graz is a very modern addition to the very traditional Austrian city of Graz. The 13100 m2, 23m tall, 60m wide museum houses modern art in its 2500m2 of exhibition space and can park 146 cars undergournd. The building has two striking features, the BIX eastern plexiglas façade and the iconic, inclinded cylinders on the roof. BIX, developed by the Berlin architecture firm of realities:united, is a system of 930 fluorescent lights which can project information, movies and animations on the side of the building at a rate of 20 intensity changes/sec. The fluorscent lights are composed of 40W ‘rings’ with 40cm dimaters and are fixed to an area approximatly 20m x 40m.

The northern-facing inclinded cylinders, or “Shlossberg-Nozzles,” are made of acrylic glass and allow daylight to enter the structure. Of the sixteen nozzels, fourteen offer daylight, one facilitates smoke ventilation and one is positioned to allow views of a famous clock tower in the city of Graz. There are 1068, 2m x 3m, 20mm thick idividually manufactured acrylic glass pannels on the exterior which are supported by more than 6,000 hold points. On the interior there are 185, 2m x 3m, 8mm thick individually shapped acrylic glass pannels held by more than 1500 hold points. The entire structure weighs 3,9 million kg of which 225,000 kg are steel structure.

-Nathan B.
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BIX is what this post is all about. Have you seen this thing? I was amazed! Here (top of page/"images + vidoes") is an almost ten minute film about the project. But here is the cool part. realities:united posted the software for BIX on their website, so you can import any quicktime video to the program and walk around in a 3D environment and watch how the video would look like on the building from different parts of the city, wether it be across the river or ontop a hill.

Mac OSX.
Windows XP.
To load a movie, click 'Read Movie.' Then just hit start. Make sure to play around with it in full screen.

In all honesty, as cool as all those lights are, that is possibly the ugliest building I've ever seen.

It looks like a cross between a slug and a Lite-Brite board.

Yeah, I wasn't a fan of that building when I saw it in a lecture three years ago, and I'm still not. It's just a style thing, I guess, but I don't like it at all. Cook's done a lot better.

Now, Kuntsthaus Bergenz... that's a gorgeous building.

i think it is very neat, probably a bitch to build.

It would look very nice if it were not surrounded by older architecture, also the notches on the top kinda make it look like a bodily organ. It would look x10 better without them. Nice idea though, but looks as though it needs to be spaced out in a lot of its own with grass, modern art-water fountains and shit surrounding it- not squashed between some old red-roofed buildings.

-X-

I'm not an architect, but I do have an interest in it, and that building makes me want to vomit.

something people need to keep in mind; you aught to see the structure before you critique it. many things look phenomenally different in the phyiscal realm.

That building looks soooo out of place.

Did any of you try out the software? That was the hole point of the topic.

Holy shit, it's a beached whale in the middle of Austria!

It looks great up close, but from a distance not so good.

Did any of you try out the software? That was the hole point of the topic.

I tried, but all I got was the evil spinning beach ball!

wow, that building looks so alien, and original, been in austria a while ago, and they have whole suburbs that look out of space, they like to push the architecture to new boundaries