American architect Stephen Holl has created a striking, aluminium clad hotel, inspired by the shape of a crumpled wine foil, for the Loisum vineyard in Lower Austria.
Langenlois is a small village at the heart of Lower Austria's wine country. These rolling vineyards are famous for the production of the Gruner Veltliner grape, along with Rieslings and a red, Zweigelt.
About an hour's drive west of Vienna two blocky, asymmetrical cubes perch in the middle of a gently sloping south-facing vineyard. Loisium is both an award-winning wine centre (opened in 2003) and a hotel and spa (opened in 2005). The aluminium skins of their angular forms are strikingly different from the surrounding traditional architecture.
The hotel and wine centre are built above a collection of 900 year old stone cellar passages that criss-cross their way beneath the vineyards. The vaults are the location for an enjoyable if somewhat curious cellar tour that ends up in the wine centre, a few hundred metres down the slope from the hotel. Both the visitors centre and hotel were designed by American architect Steven Holl with the help of the local practice of Sam / Ott-Reinisch.
When Holl turned up at the first planning meeting he took an aluminium foil wine cap and crushed it. Franz Sam, of Sam / Ott-Reinisch, knows a thing or two about his wine. But the bottles he gets, usually straight from the wine cellar, often don't come with labels, let alone foil caps. "I was bemused and took a second to make the connection", explains Sam. The analogy Holl was making concerns the angular and offset exterior planes that now 'clothe' the hotel and wine centre.
The involvement of both Holl and Sam came about quite by chance. Tuula Nidetzky, the Finnish wife of the majority owner of Loisium, met Holl at a Viennese architectural exhibition. They discussed the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, widely regarded as Holl's seminal work. This proved the catalyst for Holl's association with Loisium. Sam, on the other hand is a lecturer at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. A former student, Christian Wassmann, is a project architect for Holl. Wasmann recognised that Sam, as a consultant to the local planning authority, was uniquely placed to exploit the liberal interpretation of local planning laws. Thus Sam was the obvious choice to help with the insertion of these radical blocks in the middle of the vineyards.
Holl explains the whole development at a number of levels, literally. The cellars are by definition underground. Five metres of the 17m-high wine centre are beneath ground level. The whole centre tips slightly forward in deference to the subterranean structure beneath, leaving the hotel and spa to float above the ground.
And float it does too, due to the cantilevering of both guestroom floors above the six-metre high ground floor space. From this concrete ground floor grows a forest of pillars, each with a splayed base like the roots of a tree. Erring away from the symmetrical, the 48 pillars are often not circular, the larger ones housing services at their core. The pillars support a cantilevered concrete slab, aided by the tension of the walls and ceilings of the floors above. The minimum cantilever of the concrete slab is two metres but in places the overhang is five to six metres. The 50cm thick slab tapers towards the edge to reduce the load. The ground floor glass walls and the U-shape of the building mean that you can indeed see through it at this level. Four meeting rooms, also on the ground floor, are thus fantastic light-filled spaces.
The top two guestroom floors meanwhile are covered with an aluminium skin, punctuated with a grid pattern of square holes.
Contrary to the regimented quality of the surrounding vines, the hotel's cantilevered overhangs are just the opposite. Jutting in and out unexpectedly, these spaces are a little unnerving when coupled with the largely raw concrete of the walls and the coloured poured concrete of the floors. Certainly there is an earthy feel.
Next door, there is a split level Aveda Destination Spa, decked out over three floors in pale green mosaic - apparently Aveda's first destination spa in the country of birth of its founder, Horst Rechelbacher.
The 1,000m2 spa area has ample space for numerous exercise rooms and specific wine-related treatments, such as the Barrique Cuvee treatment, administered in a wine barrel. Sam observes of spa design, "It needs to be flexible because the spa world moves much faster than that of architecture. Already, what was to have been an specific oil treatment room has been converted into a standard treatment room."
Across the courtyard from the spa are the hotel's bar and restaurant. These are separated by a library lounge complete with large fireplace and a bookshelf-wall. The lobby area is also home to the Kiesler Corner, a small lounge area that celebrates the re-edition of furniture of the Romanian born designer, originally exhibited at Peggy Guggenheim's New York art gallery in 1942. The interlocking pieces are now produced by Austrian furniture makers, Wittmann.
The wine analogies start with Holl's crushed aluminium foil bottle cap. This provided a "memory" for the unexpectedly angular aluminium exteriors of the buildings. The plans of the cellar passageways are also used, most obviously to provide a unique back lit, cutout pattern at the entrance to each guest room. Within, sofas are upholstered with similarly designed fabric. Finally, Sam explains, the buildings were horizontally-pierced by the plan to provide a random positioning of windows on certain elevations of the hotel. (Within the wine centre the windows are glazed with the green glass of recycle wine bottles. ) Thus the grid pattering of the exterior of the hotel is randomly punctuated with larger holes or small solid panels.
This random 'piercing' pattern could almost be construed as resembling the structure of cork. However the cork connection is more clearly seen in the cut out patterns of the glass balustrade of the cantilevered hotel lobby staircase and the black, cylindrical steel pendant lampshades, the latter throwing up fabulous patterns on the pale green mosaic of the spa area. Even the dinning room chairs get in on the wine act. Designed by Holl, their curving metal frames are reminiscent of gnarled vines, in a Marcel Breuer tubular steel chair sort of way.
Not content at that, the differing colours used in the hotel also refer to the grape.
Guestroom areas of the hotel are coloured yellow (to represent the terroir of clayey earth), green (for the vines) and red (the end product!). Much of the ground floor is black, including the window frames, the aim here being to make the structural supports 'invisible' to enhance that floating feeling.
If the whole exercise sounds a little contrived, and it certainly has been deeply thought through, the reality is that it does not feel that way. The overall impression is one of a consistency of surprises, as new details emerge, becoming clearer with the passage of time. Great food, coupled with an understandably extensive wine list and Loisium really grows on you as its story unfolds.
