Bernried Town Hall

The guiding idea for the design of this structure was the need to derive a form befitting an ensemble composed of a town hall, festival and cultural halls, and a café. Is high-quality regional building to be achieved by adapting pre-existing structural and roof types, or is an 'international style' legitimated by the demands of a public building? The architects accommodated this question in their typological derivation, opting for an independent, forceful form that avoids the harshness of a rectangular flat-roofed cubature, while simultaneously refraining from an ingratiating, village-style gabled roof architecture. The various tendencies manifest in the historically evolving Bernried settlement were taken up in exemplary fashion and, combined with the austerity of the rectangular fields, compose an ambivalent figural image. The design was awarded 1st prize in an EU-wide competition and executed in three construction phases.