Hypo-Alpe-Adria Bank

Configured as an interwoven series of building components, this project melds idiosyncratic forms with landscape. Relieved of its obligation to serve as an institutional symbol, this project is free to engage the specificity of context, climate and environment with acute agility, resulting in a new icon for the bank, one that does not represent power or stability, but that responds constructively to its context. The building is partly earth building engaging its contoured landscape, and part tower, leaning 14 degrees to the south to shade itself from harsh solar exposure. Its form mediates between building, landscape and climate, and thus it integrates the inherent complexities at the edge city’s shifting relations to the local, the rural, the suburban, the urban and the metropolitan.