Statements

Colin Fournier on "cultural transgression".

"The best present that a city can give itself is to offer writers, artists, musicians, designers and architects the opportunity to tackle its historical context with playful irreverence and to transgress established rules. Graz has always done well in this respect and maintains a lively avant-garde on many fronts, hence the particular challenge for us, as outsiders, to take part in the international competition for the new Kunsthaus and to implant a new animal in the heart of the city.
Our predecessors have done some pretty exotic things: Volker Giencke's palm house, perhaps our favourite building in Graz, was one of the latest major cards to be played.
Now we have played ours. It is deliberately an alien one, one that does not refer, either in its form or its materials, to the architectural vocabulary of the surrounding urban fabric, with its red-tiled pitched roofs. The new building sticks out like something from another planet and it appears that the city is tickled and pleased with the provocation. How long will it be before it becomes familiar? Who will play the next card and what will it be? It is in the nature of transgression to call for further transgression and that is the fun of the game. Let's hope that having gone so far, together with the other radical initiatives it took as Cultural Capital of Europe for 2003, the city will not suddenly get cold feet and revert to more conservative ways!"

Colin Fournier on "quizzical movement".

"Familiar as they are, mechanical movement systems still fill us with childish delight: they defy gravity and in doing so they fight against all that is ponderous in architecture. The travelator, otherwise known as the pin, does just that. It provides a dramatic sense of elation as it sucks you up into the building, leaving you to resolve the puzzling question of how to come down again, since it only goes one way. It makes the exploration of the Kunsthaus an unbalanced kinetic experience, contributing to the unpredictability of the space and it luxuriously offers, as all museums should, two ways of taking in the artwork: a nonchalant one on the effortless glide up the pin and a more attentive one as you percolate back down to the ground."

Colin Fournier on "technological mutations".

"Despite its complex double-curved geometry, its extensive use of acrylic materials, the lean structural efficiency of its triangulated steel shell and the quiet sophistication of its low-energy environmental control systems, the Kunsthaus is not about high-tech expressionism. For this we had neither the budget nor the inclination. The technological mutation of which this building is a symptom is a deeper one, which lies is the radical change of the design process itself and its new connection with automated manufacturing processes. A non-Euclidean object such as this cannot be designed and represented by means of conventional plans, sections and elevations; it's only meaningful manifestation is as a set of 3D data in a computer software package, later to be directly linked, at the production stage, to cad-cam manufacturing tools. It is in this fundamental shift towards 3D modelling, not as a representational tool but as the only legitimate conceptual milieu for contemporary design, that the true technological revolution lies, leaving us, at times, feeling like dinosaurs on the eve of a major climatic change. This is just the beginning of the surprises that await us in the 21st century: architecture will never be the same again and this building is at the transition point."

Colin Fournier on "zoological metaphors".

"Elias Canetti said that the gradual destruction of animal species by man would inevitably impoverish humanity by reducing the number of metaphors that can be used to describe human physiognomy, behaviour and artefacts. But there are still a few animals left and the Kunsthaus is diversely known as a baby hippo, a sea slug, a porcupine, a whale, etc... It comes across, deliberately, as an improbable mixture of various species, an unclassifiable hybrid, a bio-morphic presence that is both strange (it does not seek to make reference to any animal in particular but appears to be a creature to which evolution might have accidentally given birth on another planet), and at the same time familiar in that it has the charm of a friendly mixed-breed street dog, definitely highly questionable in terms of pedigree."

Colin Fournier on "being sucked in".

"The friendly alien swallows everything with its travelator. It is like a giant Hoover, like the belly of the whale, evoking the distant memory and unconscious desire that we have, since childhood, of being swallowed by the dragon, the subtle pleasure we experience when licked by the family cat's sandpaper tongue. It is the black whole of the whale's stomach, where one can find all sorts of things: old boots, lost treasures, bewildered fish, Jonas himself: that's what a museum has to be, a place that plays on our desire to find ourselves in the company of surprising and unexpected things, bizarre confrontations, things that sometimes are not yet quite fully digested.