Villge House Steinberg 2014
Steinberg | Austria

Task: new village centre
Client: Municipality Steinberg am Rofan | Austria
Tender: Competition 1st prize

Architecture: Bernardo Bader Architects | Dornbirn
Team: Johannes Derntl (PL), Joachim Ambrosig, Simon Moosbrugger, Christina Schlüter | Dornbirn
Structural engineer: merz kley partner ZT GmbH | Dornbirn
Photo: Bernardo Bader Architekten | Dornbirn
Floor space: 460 m²
Energy: Biomass Low-energy standard 25 kWh/m²a
Structure: Timber construction

The renaissance of the village

After a break of many years, the bus once again travels the ten-kilometre route from Achenkirch in Tyrol to Steinberg am Rofan. The most magnificent public building in the village is the long church with the pointed red helmet. Approximately 300 people live in Steinberg and they are immensely musical. They have a <Stubenmusig>, a church choir, a <Soatenmusig> and for the past 150 years a federal music-band. In the new parish hall they now have their rehearsal and festival venue. It is also a coffee house, market place and gymnasium.

The new building is harmoniously integrated into the surrounding buildings and blends in naturally with the existing site. The precise placement of the building has created a gateway effect, which creates an exciting entrance and causes surprise for those arriving. The new building enters into a dialogue with the few architectural features of the existing building and, with its unmistakable orientation towards the church, opens up the previously missing central space. With its shell of rough-sawn larch boards, its slightly sloping gable roof and the concrete plinth, the village house, which is pushed slightly into the slope on the south-west side, looks, at least from a distance, like an ordinary farm building. The “stable”, built from prefabricated wooden elements, only reveals itself as a modern tavern on the south-east side, where the wooden façade opens onto the paved terrace and the village square with a large, tripartite window. The entrance is in the middle of the glass triptych. It leads to a central corridor, from which the hall leads off to the left and the public room to the right.

The division of the floor plan into three parts corresponds to the traditional room scheme of Tyrolean farmhouses. Thereby the stable has become a hall, the threshing floor an entrance hall, and the farmhouse living quarters a public room with a kitchen and functional rooms. The materials used in the interior match the simple structure.  The house is built entirely of larch: the ceiling and wall elements, the façade and the wooden casket of the interior behind the village shop window. The larches grew in the Rofan mountains and the sawyer in the village cut them. Carpenters and joiners from the region then assembled them into a piece of work without frills – a house.

The village house – built thanks to a citizens’ initiative – is now the meeting place and address of the village. It proclaims the economic importance and craftsmanship of the regional forestry and building industry in a little village at the dreamy end of the world.