After a coronavirus pandemic-induced delay, the "Club Hybrid" project - originally conceived by Heidi Pretterhofer and Michael Rieper for the Graz Year of Culture 2020 - has finally taken up quarters on a 4000 m~2 plot of land on Herrgottwiesgasse owned by Holding Graz in southern Graz. Here, on the border between the districts of Gries and Puntigam, it has introduced an expandable "demonstration building" into the eclectic landscape. With its hybridity of different stages of completion, its roughly finished walls juxtaposed with brightly framed openings, and its ties to various prototypes, the building is a timber and steel embodiment of the area's heterogeneity, it is also hybrid vertically: Above, it is a typical (albeit halved) gable-roofed shack whose two storeys accommodate a workroom, sanitary facilities and four tiny bedrooms, and below, flowing around a box-like canteen, is a space that resembles a downsized version of Mies van der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie - open on all sides and given rhythm by columns that are cruciform in cross section like those of the Barcelona Pavilion but lack the exquisite chrome-plated finish.
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