Res publica

Building is an expression of social composure in the first instance, especially where a chamber of the people is concerned. A structure of this kind that, like the Duchy of Liechtenstein’s new National Forum and Parliament, has additionally been placed in an urban context and provides a venue for public affairs therein needs to lend expression to this lofty ideal.

Gottfried Semper recognised in the “coordination and subordination” of spatial individuals the expression of a community grouped around a centre, around a moral element in its symbolically heightened form. It is a principle that found application in architecture during the period of the Roman Empire, and it serves as a starting point for Camillo Sitte’s investigation of urban architecture when he stresses the importance of “hypaethral assembly halls”, as he calls such fora. The most prominent buildings in any urban entity are clustered round the square that constitutes the nucleus of public life and hence, as well as being a gathering place, is also imbued with symbolic content.

The “Government District” in Vaduz had been the object of urban planning activities as recently as the late 1980s - on that occasion Luigi Snozzi won with his “Polis” submission in which he lent the ensemble comprising the National Museum, the Administrator’s House and the “Great House” a structural framework as the seat of government. The flank of the adjoining castle hill was to be framed by a curving structure and the public buildings - St. Florin being added later - were to be linked by a newly fashioned square. The present draft takes up these basic themes and - in part at least - retraces Snozzi’s “spatial hillside” in the curving body of the administrative wing. The “High House” is an archetypal house on the outside yet, with its round table, clearly advocates assembly “around a centre” on the inside. It stands self-confidently next to the government building in a form of composite materiality that nevertheless has a monolithic effect.

Rainer Schützeichel

The origination of a timeless primal form

The “Great House” of the government executive already constituted one of the three democratic powers of State. A High House for the legislative parliament accordingly needed to represent the other pole in the government district intended for Liechtenstein in no uncertain manner. The High House has in the process symbolically acquired the same height as the Great House. It is also designed to embody this outstanding role meaningfully and self-sufficiently - much in the way many an old town hall still today stands for the self-assurance of the citizenry in wealthy merchant towns and needs to be little more than the primal form of a house to achieve this.

Functioning as the “first house on the square”, indeed the “first house in the country” - imbuing the government district with a quarter’s cohesive texture - puts a great onus on a building that strikingly displays itself as an individual entity and one of the powers of State whilst simultaneously framing and fitting in with the community of monuments - the civitas, the municipality and the res publica - in order to merge the existing and the coming into the forum, into a small agora. What is called for is the best convention, not that which is opportune. It’s all about common sense as opposed to special effects. This approach presumes that, as well as having to serve functions, buildings also define long periods of time and in the process create places, form communities and incorporate the spirit of all involved.

Despite Luigi Snozzi’s parliament project having been rejected in a referendum conducted in 1991, his bold masterplan conceived in 1987 has been regarded as the goal of turning the little city into a government district ever since. This unredeemed opportunity for a first State and, indeed, urban centre was almost exclusively squandered in favour of stand-alones in the competition. The thrust of the latter project, by contrast, is towards a new, spatially liveable “National Forum” as a counterpoint to the urban centre at the city hall that fuses fragments of historical monuments with new clean-lined elements of like scale, materials and monochromatics.

As Petra Kiphoff of the German weekly Die Zeit argues, “In a place where just everything strives to be special, there will be nothing special to find at all in the end.” Our structure does not seek to egocentrically, formalistically, exaggeratedly add to the despotism of stand-alones but endeavours, rather, to bring clarity through a feel for scale, space, light and material to the structural embodiment of harmony between fundamental forms of rootedness and overarching correlations. But working in such a vein inevitably means being out of touch with the times these days - or, to quote Nietzsche, nothing less than having to show “the resolve to think and act within time yet against time and for a future time”. Such a remit - serving in a special manner - calls for the clearest example, after all. Into this context, therefore, clear elements are set: the Long House functions as the “serving” wing of the internal areas forming a backdrop along the base of the hill, the High House as the “served” principal of the public plenum in the foreground, and the Great Gardens as a fenced-in showpiece framing the individual monuments referred to.

The beaded trail of individual historical typologies that is so typical of the city continues through the High House. The unfussy poignancy of its primal form is thus an expression, in timelessly elemental form, of the self-evidence, body politic and significance of a national parliament as a citizens’ plenum in a prosperous mountain country. A larger-scale merging into a liveable ensemble as a kind of collage urbain will occur in front of the building. It will ultimately only be within this framework that the enclosed spatial centre of a celebratory square will take shape as the “Great National Forum” in the government district.

Hansjörg Göritz

Many thanks to the magazine der architekt

Fotos: siteco