Frog Queen
Prisma Engineering Headquarters

location: Graz, Styria, Austria
client: Prisma Engineering
team: Irene Berto, Benjamin Nejedly, Maik Rost, Erika Brunnermayer, Marius Ellwanger, Ute Himmelberg, Nikolaos Zachariadis, Hannes Freiszmuth, Ingrid Somitsch, Edith Hemmrich, Mark Blaschitz, Bernhard Kargl, Josef Roschitz, Johann Grabner
site management: Ingenos Ziviltechniker GmbH
structural consultant: werkraum wien
HVACR design: Guenter Grabner
energy consultant: Dr. Tomberger ZT GesmbH
electrical design: Moskon & Busz GmbH
photographs: © Nikolaos Zachariadis

built-up area: 1400 m²
start of planning: 1/2004
start of construction: 8/2006
completion: 8/2007

awards:
"Frog Queen" has been shortlisted in the category "office" at the World Architecture Festival 2008.

"Frog Queen" is winner of the 2nd prize at contractworld.award 2009 in the category "offices".

"Frog Queen" is winner at creative:graz award 08 in the category "Architektur".

Fassade. „Frog Queen“ ist der Name der Headquarters mit Ingenieurbueros und Pruefhalle für eine Maschinen- und Motorentechnik GmbH mit Sitz in Graz. Die geometrische Grundform des Baukörpers wird von einem Quader mit 18.125 x 18.125 x 17 m Seitenlaenge gebildet. Der markante Bau ist mit seiner außergewoehnlichen Fassadenzeichnung in unterschiedlichsten Grautoenen schon von weitem sichtbar.

Ornament. Darf die BesucherIn nach Voranmeldung und nach Sicherheitskontrolle auf das Areal, pixeln die Grauwerte langsam wie Druckrasterpunkte auf, welche sich wiederum bei weiterer Annäherung an das Gebaeude schließlich als Motive eines Ornaments darstellen. Wie von Zauberhand öffnet sich darauf langsam ein Stück Fassade – dahinter befindet sich ein verspiegelter Raum, der als Lift automatisch in das im 1. OG liegende Foyer fährt.


Project Description:
[author: Ben Pell]
The Graz-based design collective 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, the artists were 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 71.5cm, 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.