‘Frog Queen’, or the Prisma Engineering Headquarters is located in Graz, Styria, Austria.
Its facade was designed by SPLITTERWERK and looks like one giant pixelized box. Even the facade itself is practically a square. Overall, the exterior features 10 shades of gray, and the square windows seem to blend into the rest of the pattern.
Photos by Nikolaos Zachariadis, SPLITTERWERK.
Viewed from every angle the cube-shaped building is a prism.
The edge length of 18 m results in a 4½ story building with a usable surface of about 1.200 m². Besides a large test and measuring hall in the ground floor and a 3 story high atrium space was built for 30 modern computer work stations. The windows are scattered across the facade and at first sight make the building appear an indiscernible size.
The refined facade provides the viewer with an interesting interplay of short and long distances. In addition, the images of cogwheels in different sizes serve as a classical ornament.
After a planning and construction period which lasted a total of three years, Ernst Gschweitl is proud of his new company’s location: “The conception and the design are exactly what I had in mind. As a result of the extraordinary structure of the building there were some unexpected problems during the construction period, but they were solved in good time due to the perfect project management of INGENOS, which was responsible for building inspection, and due to the willingness of the other companies involved in construction.”
Project description from the architects:
‘The Graz-based design collective SPLITTERWERK was commissioned to design this headquarters building for PRISMA Engineering, a machine and motor technology company also located in Graz. The objective was to design a structure which could house the company’s various research and development programs, and selectively showcase the work to a varied range of often competing clientele. Thus the building design needed to accommodate both high-end testing and presentation without jeopardizing the security and secrecy with which the work is developed.
The building form approximates a cube, measuring 18.125 x 18.125 x 17m, wrapped on all four elevations with a pixilated pattern of square panels. From a distance, these panels appear to be painted in a range of ten values of grey tone, together dematerializing the volume of the building against both the trees of the surrounding site and the clouds and sky. Thus the cubic building is at once monumental in its objecthood in the open landscape – scale-less and immaterial – and yet utterly non-iconographic in its overall form.
As is characteristic of their work, SPLITTERWERK was interested in developing a play between pictorial image and spatial experience. Working with the effects of dimension, distance, and time, the building’s skin was designed to generate shifting perceptions of the volume and texture. As one approaches the building, the cubic proportions of the volume become apparent, as does the finer grain of surface articulation on each panel, comprised not of a single grey tone but rather a tight grid of abstract pictorial figures. These figures might be interpreted as flowers, speaking to the surrounding fields, or gear wheels, suggestive of the highly secretive work happening inside the building. Each façade panel is itself nearly square, measuring 67 x 71.5-cm, and made of powder-coated aluminum, screen-printed with the various images. Integrated within this field of figures, deployed at the scale of both panel and building, windows and doors are similarly considered such that they essentially disappear within the composition of the façade.
At the interior, individual office spaces are wallpapered with images of the surrounding Eastern Styrian landscape, creating a conceptual tension between the interior of the building envelope (narrative and pictorial) and the visual effects of its exterior panels (abstract and spatial). In this sense, the decorative strategy for both interior and exterior is conceived with certain landscape sensibilities in mind; a visual context which is simultaneously pictorial in its framed references and affective in the atmosphere it produces.’
