Club Hybrid – an Open Demonstrative Building in Graz
Club Hybrid is an open demonstrative building in Graz designed to be an experimental site for exhibitions, presentations, and discussions during summer 2021. With residencies and daily programmes Club Hybrid is workshop and stage in an urban “fog zone” for two months. Through scientific, artistic and activist formats we sample new working and living practices and discuss aspects of urban participation, urban development and hybridity.
Club Hybrid is an active intervention. It questions current urban planning policies and encourages research and discussion of possible ways to reinterpret and push the limits of urban space with the goal of creating an applied practice of production and quality living in an urban environment.
Instead of a short-lived structure that is dismantled at the end of the season, the Club Hybrid is designed as a reusable structure, that is to be further developed into a permanent urban object. The anticipation of future uses, in a balance of openness and commitment, is part of the concept and has been debated and developed with interested parties in real and virtual meetings since the start of the project.
Urban Fog Zone
“When a city is good for surprises, then it is urban.”
Wolfgang Kil
In the south of Graz, the city’s “foggy zone”, infrastructure issues play a central role; supply and disposal facilities such as the junkyard, the small Mühlgang river and the central cemetery Zentralfriedhof are in the immediate vicinity, and at the same time the area is optimally connected to public transport by tram line 5. Living, working, learning, exercising, praying and handicrafts are not mutually exclusive here.
The former nursery on the site of Herrgottwiesgasse 155 – 161 is placed in the Gries district, the building materials store on the opposite side of the street is already situated in the district of Puntigam. The neighbour to the west is the Islamic Cultural Centre Graz. This “unnoticed spot” of Graz’s urban space, a decentralised, heterogeneous mixed-use area, is the appropriate place to work on urban necessities and possibilities.
Here, Club Hybrid constructs a place that works daily with public needs and urban necessities and explores questions of work and life in the city and urban planning.
Demonstrative Building
“The architecture we build is a hybrid, an in-between, something mixed.”
(Heidi Pretterhofer and Michael Rieper)
We are building a large table, the scale is dimensionless. The table provides shelter and shade for many summer activities and a canteen. On top of the table is a simple wooden object with very specific spatial qualities open for use. This architecture is a model that has the capacity to change over time, to expand or relocate, to change place. A structure that demonstrates the process of architecture, urban context and public need.
The Club’s playground is around 4,000m², more than 200m² of which is weather-protected. 36 steel columns support a hybrid platform made of steel and wood, on which a half, two-story wooden house with 110m² of usable space stands.
Club Hybrid
Herrgottwiesgasse 161
8055 Graz
Premiere: 10 June, 2021
Residencies and programme: 11 June – 15 August, 2021
Project authors: Heidi Pretterhofer and Michael Rieper
As part of Graz Kulturjahr 2020
