Starry sky at night in the vineyards

The down-to-earth wine growers, joined more recently by a handful of gourmet cooks, who together give the gentle hills of southern Burgenland its culinary profile are friendly, deliberate and cautious people. Growth at any price does not exist here. Only what is really needed is built. Integration in the structures of the cultivated landscape is taken for granted, and contemporary design strategies are becoming increasingly common. And, as we know, these are not contradictory, but perfectly complementary.

Hannes Traupmann from Pichler & Traupmann Architekten comes from this region – and its needs and way of thinking are also his. In Deutsch-Schützen, where producers of Blaufränkisch and cuvée wines known beyond the region such as Krutzler, Schützenhof, Wachter and Weber are at home, these architects have already equipped wineries with intelligent production, presentation and storage spaces. A number of years ago a local family embarked upon the adventure of building a restaurant intended not only to meet the culinary needs of the growing numbers of wine tourists but also to serve as a traditional inn for the native populace.

Pichler & Traupmann designed this building using robust stackings and diagonals in the typical pxt handwriting. The restaurant sits amidst the vineyards; from the terrace it offers an almost hypnotic view across the idyllic, vine-covered hillsides. Gourmets immediately greeted the new restaurant enthusiastically. On Sunday after church the wine-growers also like to sit there and enjoy a glass of beer and a schnitzel together. In school book fashion one can learn here what “organic growth” and “gentle tourism” actually mean. The success of the enterprise soon raised the question about providing overnight accommodation for guests who, after a lavish dinner with wine, do not want or ought not to drive home. In addition to the vinotheque already in the building there was thus a need for “housing”. It was only now, on the basis of solid experience, that the planning began – and not the other way around on the basis of vague projected needs.

The inn-keepers Wachter-Wiesler discussed the matter with Hannes Traupmann and the timber building engineer Richard Woschitz. The first design featured polygonal boxes as living spaces that were to be casually scattered across the adjoining vineyards. The timber construction and timber facades were intended to reflect the rural context, the geometric forms to satisfy design ambitions, and the placing among the vines to give the guests the greatest possible feeling of being rooted in the place. Very soon it seemed to the neighbouring wine-growers and a tax consultant who works for them that this project offered considerable opportunities for further opening up this bastion of red wine to tourism. Ultimately the winegrowers benefit when, after a wine-tasting, their customers can enjoy a high quality meal and then spend the night in suitable accommodation. And so they joined forces with the inn-keepers for the construction project. A number of vineyards behind the restaurant were put together to provide a site, the plan was to erect a total of ten identical dwelling units.

The first discussions with the authorities were then held. A land use planner from the regional administration, Rupert Schatovich, who also takes a personal interest in architecture through Architektur Raum Burgenland, functioned as the catalyst for the planning process and set up a kind of dialogue between various official bodies about the right kind of volume and the possibilities of increasing the density of the project. And so the designers took the typical structure of endless parallel rows of vines, which run at a distance of about one-and-a-half metres apart almost straight downhill forming “free” strips of space between them, and integrated it directly in the internal layout of the individual dwelling units.

The two functional zones – on the one hand circulation, lounge and bathroom/WC, on the other the sleeping area – were interpreted as two strips of different length, approximately the same width as the space between the rows of vines. This structure allowed the ten small houses to be smoothly “slotted” into the existing appearance of the landscape. (...) (…)
Matthias Boeckl

The article in full length and more pictures can be found in architektur.aktuell