Mautern is a typically Alpine locality at the foot of the Eisenerz Alps. With a landscape that can be both appealing or marked by a certain barrenness or melancholy depending on the season, the architecture is dominated by rural normality. The development is conceived as the structural end-point of a side valley that rises from the centre of the village. At the same time, the volumes drive an architectural wedge into the landscape and thus accentuate a boundary situation and an intersection between two areas. Approaching the place, the tower building at the end is a clear marker indicating the beginning of the site almost in the manner of a railway buffer. In the dramaturgy of the development, the architecture creates a series of breaks, thus distinguishing between beginning and end, nature and culture, landscape and village.
(Text von Arno Ritter)
