A sea of blossoms

Both architects agreed on the South Tyrolean artist Manfred Alois Mayr, with whom they developed out a very particular concrete relief for the main surface of the new complex.

The exhibits of the Vorarlberger Landesmuseum, comprising a vast variety of ancient vessels, served Mayr as inspiration for his idea. The chalices and bowls inspired him to use a modern everyday container for his art-in-architecture – the PET bottle. He started to experiment with plastic bottles and when taking an impression of the bottle’s base, he realized that it was reminiscent of a flower’s blossom. Eventually, images of  thirteen different bottle bases are found on the concrete surface. It was Mayr’s desire to scatter the different motifs across the concrete surface without letting the arrangement appear unplanned. He turned to Urs B. Roth for help, an architect, mathematician and artist himself. He developed a mathematical method for the dispersion of the pattern assigning each blossom a specific place on the concrete surface based on a grid.

Subsequently, the scatter pattern contrived by Roth had to be merged with Mayrs motifs to prepare a formwork. The PET bottles selected by the artist were sent to RECKLI in Herne. Since the blossoms protruded more than 45 millimeters from the concrete surface, the negatives for the elastic formliners could not be milled as usual into MDF panels by the use of a CNC milling machine. Thus, Volker Urmoneit, head of the Reckli model-making department, took matters into his own hands and manufactured the mouldings himself. The positives he produced were then mounted onto the corresponding MDF panels. “During this project, our high-precision CNC milling machine had only the task of drilling the holes for the manual mounting of the plastic flowers at their exact places”, says Urmoneit.