Kunsthaus Graz

• Name — Kunsthaus Graz • Location Town — Graz • Location Country — Austria • Inauguration Date — 2003 • Architect — Colin Fournier and Peter Cook • Architectural Style — Blob architecture • Illustration — City view from the Castle Hill (Schlossberg) with Kunsthaus in the centre

Kunsthaus Graz was designed by Colin Fournier and Sir Peter Cook. According to The Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London, the Kunsthaus's design sought to be a deliberately provocative, innovate museum design by offering a less "institutional" approach to organising exhibition spaces and employs new materials and manufacturing techniques. The building is an example of blob architecture and has a skin made from iridescent blue acrylic panels, which also double as photovoltaic panels. Owing to its shape and its contrast to its surroundings, it is known as the "Friendly Alien". The building incorporates the façade of the Iron House, an iron-framed structure built in 1848.

Architecture, design, new media, internet art, film, and photography are united under one roof. Kunsthaus Graz was developed as an institution to stage international exhibitions of multidisciplinary, modern and contemporary art from the 1960s to the present day. It doesn't collect art, maintains no permanent exhibitions and doesn't have its own depot. Rather, its exclusive purpose is to present and procure contemporary art productions. As founding director, Peter Pakesch was responsible for the Kunsthaus's orientation and programme between the administration in 2003 and the end of his directorship at the Universalmuseum Joanneum.

• Illustration — The Kunsthaus Graz at night showing the big pixel media façade The big pixel (BIX) façade of the museum represents a singular fusion of architecture and New Media and is based on a concept of the Berlin architects realities:united. BIX, a fusion of the words "big" and "pixels", is the acrylic glass skin of the eastern side of the building, which consists of 930 fluorescent lamps, whose brightness can be adjusted individually. Variable at 20 frames per second, the façade can be used as a large screen for films and animations in what is referred to as a "communicative display skin". The BIX façade concept was entered into the permanent Architecture and Design Collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 2011.

On 1 May 2011, the Austrian Postal Service released a stamp commemorating the object as part of the Kunsthäuser permanent stamp series. To mark the tenth anniversary of the Kunsthaus, Ingo J. Biermann, Fiene Scharp and Kai Miedendorp made a short half-documentary film in and about the building. The film Astronaut's Ark was conceived for the Kultur:Stadt exhibition, which took place from March to June 2013 at the Akademie der Künste (Berlin) and from July to October 2013 at the Kunsthaus Graz.