This building appeared on the new campus of the Vienna University of Economics (WU). The total area of the university premises is about 10 hectares, and the master plan for the development of the territory located next to the Prater Park was developed by the Vienna office BUSarchitektur. In accordance with this project, the center of the entire composition was the building of the Library and the Knowledge Center (its author is Zaha Hadid), and around it the educational buildings of various faculties are concentrated.
The building of the Faculty of Law and Administration of the University stretched along the border of the site, thus finding itself directly opposite the park. In fact, CRAB studio had to come up with a "park" facade of the entire university, especially considering that the length of the building is just over 200 meters. The architects emphasized the transition from the forest to the urbanized environment with the help of a shell made of wooden blinds: the lamellas are made of unplaned boards and are placed both vertically and horizontally, which gives the facades of the complex an interesting, constantly changing pattern.
If the building looks at the park with a single extended facade, then it faces the campus with a whole ensemble of volumes having different shapes, lengths and number of storeys. With the help of the "sunken" and pushed forward parts of the building, the architects create a system of pedestrian squares, "pockets" and terraces, that is, public spaces of varying degrees of intimacy. They, as the authors of the project hope, will create a communicative environment that is so necessary for any educational process. To collect this complex agglomerate of volumes into a single composition helps the soft plastic common for all parts of the building (there are no sharp corners in principle), as well as a bright palette that has absorbed all shades of the warm part of the spectrum - from deep red to sunny yellow. The building of the university administration turned out to be the same in its architecture - formally it is a separate volume, in terms of vaguely resembling a boomerang, but due to its shape it is so precisely "fitted" to its neighbor that it seems to be a part of it.
The principle of the diversity of public spaces is also the basis for the internal layout of the building: auditoriums and lecture halls here coexist with a large number of recreations, places for comfortable communication and secluded activities. In the future, the project also provides for greening the facades of the building and the adjacent territory.
