Hypo Alpe-Adria Center is one of the two bank complex Morphosis commissioned for Hypo Alpe-Adria Bank in Austria. The bank complex consists of an office block, commercial space, archive, staff residence and a kindergarten, located at Klagenfurt suburb, away from the city centre, which contains a border condition of coalition between urban sprawl and agricultural area. This edge condition triggers the architect’s intention to mediate the complex between these two extreme typologies, by breaking down the complex into different scales of volumes that make reference to the large shopping malls and tiny suburban
houses nearby. Thus the power of the modern day bank is the dematerialization and integration of transaction into the everyday. In these series of drawings we explore the effects of a bank building no longer defined as singular autonomous monument, and rather there is a shift of power to the momentum of inter-connectivity with the social and built context.  We focused on the southwest public entrance and also the bank branch sitting within the atrium of the five-storey high mass as the heart and centre of the complex. Their relationships in respective to facade, organisation, urban context, and grounding are calmly and carefully dissected throughout the four drawings.

The bank entrance area is the most expressive in terms of grounding power where its artificial gradation directly reflects the gradation of the ceiling of the event centre. This direct relationship between ground and ceiling prompts us to explore the sectional relationships extend beyond them. The inclination of event centre rooftop extends and bends continuously to form a thick undulating facade which penetrates the entire complex. Second the courtyard in the middle of the complex also form an enclave responding to the rectilinear gesture of nearby building mass. In overall, the ground and the building form creates a coherent dialogue, of a convergent tectonic shift, which is tilted together by a strong natural force.

Programme is orientated in terms of a radial power hierarchy in the complex, while the obstruction of the structural grid and building form results in an undulating blurred boundary which exerts power distance from exterior to interior. This hierarchy also behaves the same in terms of relationships between public and private programmes. Public sectors of the bank are placed on the periphery of the site while the intensity of security and privacy increase as one starts to penetrate into the central part of the complex. Most peripheral parts of the complex are being elevated, so to create an underlying, intermediate
zone. Such layering immerses the pedestrian in sequences of building forms unknown of their actual functions. Circulations are also drawn in order to show the simple strong and powerful structure in connecting different parts of the bank, which is in contrast to the dispersed nature of the building mass. Finally, by extracting the column grids, we can also argue that the architecture expresses its power through obstructing the rigidity of a construction gird with undulating building envelopes.

We explore the duality of the bank-social centre in the interlacing moire of building volumes of according to transparency and extracting the order and elemental transparency of the facades of each of these volumes. Transparent volumes (mostly public functions) are interlaced with windowless secluded volumes (private functions, archives) as fingers creating multiple visual layers merging banking and other functions. We discover that the number of layers did not equate to more transparent facades, revealing a post-functional and decorative nature of some of these volumes. The unique characterisation of each facade comes from the breaking of the vertical and horizontal grid, often times into function-less, “decorative” spaces.