DU Office Arlbergstraße, Bregenz (AT)

The architects rebuilt the hall-shaped first floor of the former Altmann Textile Factory into an office for their own purposes. They preserved the walls, windows and especially the russet magnesite flooring into which decades of use had in scribed themselves like on palimpsest. The roof-bearing system had to be restored, and the division into parallel room zones, as well as the separation of acoustically and optically protected working rooms were newly done. A central series of slender steel stanchions separate the long former production hall into roughly two ships, superposed by a three-strip division in terms of occupancy zones. A tension modifying any exact spatial division results from this inequality.
At the entrance, some space is open across the building’s entire breadth for the entrance hall, secretariat and waiting area. Behind, the ground plan develops into the depth with three parallel room zones. The concurrence of the integral floor with the ceiling, showing barely a structuring intervention on the part of the steel joists and overarching the room’s entire width, upholds the unity of this open-plan office in spite of the furnishing and partitions.

Client: Dietrich | Untertrifaller
Location: A-6900 Bregenz, Arlbergstraße 117
Architecture: Dietrich | Untertrifaller
Project management: Helmut Dietrich, Much Untertrifaller
Construction: 1996 / Extension 2001, 2013

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photos: © Bruno Klomfar, © Dietrich | Untertrifaller