The Letter C is out!
In this issue we look at the sun. Yes, the sun. Sunlight. Sun worship. Dying in the sun. Staring at it. Windows, circles, things that look like the sun. A new era and its potential joys. "The Sun" yearns for eternal daylight. "I see, Therefore I Am" describes the additional layers of meaning that architectural photography can provide. "Winterbourne Sweat" speaks of transcending the anguish of a new global temperature. And "Spooky Drawer" narrates a trip to see the spot where the Swiss architect Le Corbusier drowned swimming towards the sun in 1965.
2 years in the making, our multi-purpose building in the outskirts of Salzburg is almost ready. Can you tell we're really into red lately?
Barn red? Burnt umber? Redwood? Indian red? Smoked salmon? Windsor tan? Chestnut? Marron? Technically the colour is RAL 3016, and when applied on wooden boards it turns this family chalet into a kinky incarnation of regional timber-cladding, a cheeky expression of folk.
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A complete interior renovation of a modest Siedlung house on the southern edge of Salzbburg. The ground floor contains the open kitchen, living room, dining room and two bedrooms. The first floor houses the master bedroom, and a basement contains ample room for entertaining.
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What is relentlessly curvaceous, potentially deadly, visually stunning, and mighty cold? The Grossglockner Hochalpenstrasse, Austria’s most famous road. The year was 2021 and perched up there in glorious solitude was a wooden inn called Mankei, inoculated against the bitter winter, as if whittled-down by natural selection.
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Vient de paraître! The Letters ABCD is our quarterly magazine, lovingly written and edited by us, brought to you for free. We talk about things that often escape the margins of the project, that escape the every-day running of an architectural office. In our second issue we discuss some of the things that might happen when one travels.
The Letters ABCD is Steiner Architecture’s inaugural magazine. Necessarily open-ended, protean, confident, cheeky. It strives to be more than a glorified business card. But can it? Nevermind. It showcases the studio’s built projects, unbuilt projects, preliminary arguments, not-so-preliminary arguments, inchoate ideas.
Launched in 1957, Sputnik was the first man-made satellite to orbit the Earth. This unassuming four-legged sphere circled our planet for three months before disintegrating in the atmosphere and occasioned the awkward period we know as the Space Race.
Pick up the cadaver of the word c-o-m-p-l-e-x and drive it to the Austrian Alps. Tucked away on Lake Zell is a house to which that royal among the has-beens of buzzwords, depleted of meaning from years of overuse, might genuinely apply. The project’s starting point was formal and postmodern: Louis Kahn’s Trenton Bath House (NJ, 1955). Thus the house’s pyramid hip roof sits on a square base. Thus the distribution of the ground floor. Thus the courtyard takes its cue from the opening in Kahn’s roof.
A neglected attic has come to life in a listed 1835 building near Vienna’s Ringstrasse. Age notwithstanding, the loadbearing parts allowed for a surprisingly open plan. And with a slight change to the roof’s pitch, areas otherwise too low became suitable for living. The result was a protracted, unencumbered space that spans the entire Southwest side.
