Situating architectural performance: 'star architecture' and its roles in repositioning the cities of Graz, Lucerne and Wolfsburg

Situating architectural performance: ‘star architecture’ and its roles in repositioning the cities of Graz, Lucerne and Wolfsburg

Nina Alaily-Mattar, Dominik Bartmanski, Johannes Dreher, Michael Koch, Martina Löw, Timothy Pape & Alain Thierstein

To cite this article: Nina Alaily-Mattar, Dominik Bartmanski, Johannes Dreher, Michael Koch, Martina Löw, Timothy Pape & Alain Thierstein (2018): Situating architectural performance: ‘star architecture’ and its roles in repositioning the cities of Graz, Lucerne and Wolfsburg, European Planning Studies, DOI: 10.1080/09654313.2018.1465896

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2018.1465896

Published online: 24 Apr 2018.

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Situating architectural performance: ‘star architecture’ and its roles in repositioning the cities of Graz, Lucerne and Wolfsburg

Nina Alaily-Mattar a, Dominik Bartmanski b, Johannes Dreher a, Michael Koch c, Martina Löw b, Timothy Pape c and Alain Thierstein a

aDepartment of Architecture, Technische Universität München, München, Germany; bDepartment of Sociology, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany; cDepartment of Urban Planning, Hafen City Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

ABSTRACT
Since the opening of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in 1997, the topic of how ‘star architecture’ plays a decisive role in urban regeneration has been discussed in academic debates as well as in the media. Efforts to emulate the so-called Bilbao effect followed internationally. However, not every city that commissions the design of a public cultural building to a star architect seeks to replicate that effect. This overarching narrative has nevertheless constituted a powerful background representation. This paper discusses the supposed replicability of the ‘effect’. The aim is to emphasize relational situatedness and plurality of roles of star architecture as a device of urban regeneration. The process of repositioning of a city does not necessarily follow the logic of international economic competition. When it comes to medium-sized cities, we observe that they aim at distinction within a specific field, in their nation-state, or try to reinvent their internal dynamics. This process can have expressive and symbolic, not merely instrumental character, and be understood as more of a socio-cultural performance rather than a purely economic investment. We juxtapose three empirical cases to illustrate the argument: Kunsthaus in Graz, Culture and Congress Centre Lucerne and Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg.

1. Introduction
   Since the opening of the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao in 1997, the topic of how cultural flagships designed by famous architects could play a decisive role in urban regeneration has been increasingly discussed in academic debates as well as in the media. The present paper opens up empirical and analytic contexts in which one can revisit the complexities associated with the so-called Bilbao effect. We do it by looking at the intricate processes of repositioning of cities through three star architectural projects. Such projects introduce profound urban, morphological, economic and socio-cultural changes in their

respective cities. They are costly investments, frequently politically motivated and contested, especially when publicly funded. Their necessity tends to be justified by the proponents with the argument that these projects will yield significant direct or indirect regeneration effects. The Bilbao effect has come to signify such a putative relation and expectations based on it. This was also the case in the three situations discussed here, even though comparability of different urban situations is obviously restricted by localized path dependencies. This article aims to examine how various relevant cases differ, looking in particular at the exhibition centre for contemporary art ‘Kunsthaus’ in Graz, Austria, Culture and Convention Centre in Lucerne, Switzerland, and Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg, Germany. Each one of these examples is a publicly commissioned cultural facility designed by an internationally renowned architect, the appointment of which was related to international architectural competition. That much was common to the cases. However, the process of implementing and developing such projects usually takes various turns over many years and it was also the case in these three projects. Accompanied by intensive media discourses, star architectural projects typically ‘arouse public attention causing disputes and controversies’ (Yaneva, 2009, p. 8).

The reason why star architectural projects rivet heightened attention and breed controversies is that they are not only utilitarian interventions of experts. They also involve many individuals and various constituencies that have symbolic interests and local attachments. In fact, they are always related to people’s sense of place, aesthetics and citizen pride, and may mean ‘managing spoiled identity’ (Rivera, 2008). These sensitive sociological factors vary across time and space contexts. That is to say, every architectural project becomes effective as a developmental performance relative to specific sets of relations unfolding continuously in a given place. For this reason, the present paper proposes to contextualize each case of repositioning of cities through star architecture via the relational concept of situatedness. Each city can be understood as having its own socio-cultural logic (Löw, 2008) and its own morphological composition and economic challenges that need to be addressed, each of which is a path-dependent process (North, 1990). This means that generic policy templates need to undergo translation to fit local conditions. Crucially, the divergence of objectives means that from the very inception these projects are geared towards different roles in the repositioning of their respective cities. In other words, not every city that commissions the design of a public cultural building to a star architect seeks to emulate the so-called Bilbao effect, although this overarching narrative constitutes a powerful background representation. In what follows, we discuss the relevant strands of that discourse and flesh out our conceptual framework. The idea is to question the apparent assumption of the discourse suggesting that a replicable mechanism obtains. We wish to contribute to the body of research that presents evidence that we should go ‘beyond Bilbao narrative’ couched in those terms. To better appreciate the critically important differences between locally situated projects, we explicitly reflect on variability of star architecture’s roles by juxtaposing specific cases in accordance with Robinson’s methodological arguments (Robinson, 2011, p. 5).

2. Literature review

There seems to be an inflation of definitions regarding star architecture projects which may suggest that this term functions today as a place holder for many different social

values and ideologies serving diverse interests. For example, ‘flagship architecture’ or ‘cultural flagship’ are used to refer to buildings and institutions that attract visitors with corresponding economic implications for the institution and the city (Weidenfeld, 2010, p. 851). The related term of ‘iconic architecture’ is either defined as an architectural genre (Jencks, 2006) or famous symbolically laden building (Sklair, 2006; Kaika, 2015). Finally, the terms ‘starchitecture’ (Foster, 2008; Ponzini, 2016) and ‘signature architecture’ (McNeill, 2009) are frequently used to analytically distinguish the celebrity status of the involved architects, and the effects of their signature products.

Researchers working within those perspectives investigated the impacts of both flagshipness and iconicity for urban regeneration, local tourism and restructuring of the region’s economy. In this context, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao has become the master example. Following the transformative role that the Guggenheim Museum designed by Frank Gehry has played in the Basque city of Bilbao, the buzzword ‘Bilbao effect’ has become a widely circulated term to describe transformations related to star architecture projects in a generic way. In the context of cities attempting to secure growth in a global urban system and engaging in ‘a competitive race to reinvent their destinies with architecture’ (Jencks, 2004), the Bilbao effect became an urban policy in motion (González, 2011), mainstreaming the idea of culture-led urban regeneration (Evans, 2005), ‘architourism’ (Ockman & Salomon, 2005) and ‘architainment’ (Fernández-Galiano, 2005). It is argued that ‘magnet cities’ (Haynes & Langley, 2014) and ‘phoenix cities’ (Power, Plöger, & Winkler, 2010) are those aiming to counteract urban decline with such projects. Substantial research within the perspective of the political economy has focused on the array of effects on the local economy, for example, on the creation of jobs (Plaza, 2010), on the local art scene (Plaza, Tironi, & Haarich, 2009) and as a global networking engine (Plaza & Haarich, 2015). Effects on the local enhancement of culture have been thematized as well (Lazzeretti & Capone, 2015), including so-called hard branding the city (Evans, 2005). Plaza, González-Casimiro, Moral-Zuazo, and Waldron (2014) argue that a link exists between ‘culture-led place reimagining’ and economic development of cities. They attribute increases in the number of domestic and foreign visitors in Bilbao to the influence of the Guggenheim Museum in online media.

Despite informative contribution to knowledge of urban planning, there are two general difficulties with those analyses. First, there is a danger of reducing the topic to physicality of a building at hand, reifying its iconic properties. Buildings are never isolated physical objects. Their role cannot be abstracted from function, social audiences and morphology. Architecture becomes the spatial referent of narratives (Jensen, 2007, p. 219), which in turn cannot be separated from the media campaigns conducted to construct (and constrict) its interpretation (Vale, 1999, p. 391).

Too often we tend to see the role of the built environment in the production of legitimacy merely in terms of individual buildings. Such objects may indeed become the focus for sustained reflection on a real or imagined past or may participate in a newly invented heritage, but buildings need to be seen in their true double context: as pieces of cities and as sources of media representations. (Vale, 1999, p. 406)

Second, it is problematic to causally dissociate a given aspect of star architecture, for example, the physical structure, the function, the institution or the site. They are tightly

intertwined with each other in various ways, forming a process that we call here ‘star architectural project’. Klingmann (2007, p. 250) warns that strategic and deliberate use of architecture as a catalyst to set off economic and social transformations [...] cannot be attained by a mindless repetition of a formula (that only worked once, anyway). [...] I[t] would be a great mistake to think that the Guggenheim effect is a generic recipe that can be duplicated.

City is not an enterprise, nor is it a new product, which means you cannot ‘sell’ different cities according to the same formula (Paddison, 1993). Instead, each star architectural project is a unique ‘social performance’ within a given city (Alexander, 2004, 2012). What this means in practice is that a ‘successful’ performance is not just a function of current urban development. Rather, ‘other factors like historical experiences are likely to determine opportunities for competitive and sustainable future development in a more efficient way’ (Giffinger, Fertner, Kramar, & Meijers, 2007, p. 4).

A significant amount of urban studies literature is concerned with how to account in a refined way for the experience of the so conceived star architecture. Architectural projects are said to be staged as a permanent event (Zukin, 1995). The question is then how these projects contribute to the ‘eventisation’ of the city (Müller & Bräuer, 2002; Richards & Palmer, 2010), as well as how the subsequent attention pattern is used to initiate major developmental effects (Altrock et al., 2011). Foster (2008) goes so far as to claim that these buildings cannot be read at the ground level; instead, the media is their primary site. They are said to be designed also, or even primarily, to occupy a virtual site in the media, contributing to the ‘aestheticisation of urban space in cognitive cultural capitalism’ (Scott, 2012, p. 140). This line of argumentation is in turn utilized by critics of contemporary iconic architecture who see it mostly as global signifiers of capitalist power. For example, Ronneberger, Lanz, and Jahn (1999) argue that these buildings reflect the representational needs of the new class of service producers. Sklair (2006) expands this critique to what he terms the ‘transnational capitalist class’. Sudjic (2005) argues that they serve to soothe the ‘edifice complex’ of the rich and the powerful. McNeill (2009) notes that both boutique or signature architects and the ‘global architects’ of international architecture firms are increasingly implicated in the production of branding strategy for their clients.

What all this seems to mean is that nowadays media play a formidable role in changing the relation between clients, star architects and representations of buildings. Although useful in understanding mechanisms by which architecture can be instrumentalized for specific purposes, this critical framework is not perfectly applicable to public cultural flagships designed by star architects. As Patterson (2012) showed, most of the star architectural commissions come from public urban authorities. In other words, star architectural projects cannot be hijacked by the debate of ‘iconic building’ in late global cultural capitalism (Jencks, 2006). Although the authors who provide insightful critiques of late capitalism, they run a risk of reproducing economistic understanding of architecture as a mere tool of power or prestige, focusing on normative aspects of the relevant discussions. Following Patterson, we would like to argue that there is more to the topic. The positioning of a city might not or not only follow the logic of international comparison among cities but rather that of distinction within a field or a city. It relates to how a city understands and presents itself, and how a given intervention may change its experiential character. This can be ‘expressive rather than instrumental, irrational rather than

rational, more like theatrical performance than economic exchange’ (Alexander & Mast, 2006, p. 2).

One benefit of thinking in terms of locally situated performance is that it allows to trace different roles in architectural processes. This is important because it helps avoid the fallacy of universal classifications and conventional denotations (Yaneva, 2012, p. 109). Instead, looking at interrelated embedded elements of performance opens up distinct traces of intertwined narratives shaped by architectural projects. This leads us to propose a different composite definition of the key concepts and their mutual relations.

The phrase ‘star architectural project’ implies here that it is (1) a process, (2) of designing and constructing a physical structure (3) by an internationally renowned architect, (4) to house a civic institution, (5) on a strategically identified urban site, (6) in order for star architecture to perform particular functions, (7) each of which is enacted over time according to specificities of the location (8) resulting in sets of localized meanings. In this research, these elements are considered as intertwined categories of investigation.

Consequently, ‘repositioning of cities’ is understood as a desired goal of public authorities to alter the performance of a given city, either vis-à-vis other cities perceived as directly relevant or in response to internal challenges. In cities, people develop ‘shared meanings’ (Löw, 2013) in relation to which new projects can make sense as urban innovation. As far as the cases of Lucerne, Wolfsburg and Graz are concerned, each star architectural project ‘repositions’ them in regard to the shared meanings that are often expressed in typical narratives of the place (Jensen, 2007). That is to say, star architecture can put a new spin on what is perceived to be an existing asset worth ‘reclaiming’ or restructuring. Such assets are relational properties, not absolute values. They are constituted locally and continually redefined.

3. Methodology

This paper presents selected findings of an interdisciplinary research project concerned with the roles of star architectural projects in repositioning of three aforementioned host cities. The case studies were selected based on the following criteria. First, the star architectural projects are publicly or private-publicly funded cultural facilities, and as such, they are assumed to have a stronger urge for legitimation of spending of public tax monies. Second, the process of appointing the architects involved international architectural competitions that meant an increased degree of international visibility potentially useful as ‘valuable strategy for public relations’ (Lehver, 2011, p. 309). Third, architects commissioned were professionals of international acclaim. This was validated by a media search in the Avery database index of architecture journals. Fourth, these facilities have been initiated, designed, implemented and appropriated in the respective cities within roughly overlapping time frames, all opened in the early 2000s. Fifth, the case studies were chosen in different German-speaking countries, Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Although these countries form the contemporary geopolitical centre of Europe, the situation before 1989 was quite different, such that Wolfsburg and Graz found themselves at the eastern fringe of the so-called Western world. This Cold War condition meant that the relative significance of the cities’ positions changed. Previously central in Germany, Wolfsburg became peripheral after the Second World War, and Graz’s role of a

gateway to the Balkans was discontinued (see Figure 1). Cut off from their previous geo-economic networks, these cities’ potential for growth was impaired.

Unpacking the issue of the cities’ size is also worth considering but should not be conflated with the cities’ ranking position. Although different in terms of territorial and demographic terms, all three cities examined here could be understood as either ‘smaller’ European cities with less than 500,000 inhabitants (de Lavergne & Mollet, 1991; Gospodini, 2002, pp. 65, 72) or as cities that are ‘medium-sized on a European scale’ (Giffinger et al., 2007, p. 3). They do not compete with big metropolises in their respective countries. However, they are within a commutable distance to national metropolises of international significance (Wolfsfburg next to Berlin and Luzern next to Zurich) or relatively close to the capital city (Graz near Vienna). The city’s ability to regenerate itself ‘is not necessarily a function of size because even medium or small size cities may have this ability’ (Giffinger et al., 2007, p. 4). In fact, more pertinent research projects conducted in last 20 years have shed light on how to go beyond the large-city paradigm and take into account the role of small and medium-sized cities (Camagni, Capello, & Caragliu, 2015). Moreover, a number of other taxonomic and functional approaches have been developed to capture historical and context related dimensions of cities’ potential and actual ability to regenerate (e.g. Pumain, 2006; Hall and Pain, 2006; Burger & Meijers, 2012; Meijers, Burger, & Hoogerbrugge, 2016). What brings our three different urban

cases closer to each other is the perceived situation of relative provincialism whose overcoming, i.e. regeneration, is generally signified by the Bilbao effect discourse.

In short, cities that differ in size within certain classification but interpret themselves as facing a similar predicament such as provincial position can and should be examined side by side, especially that as Robinson argues it is precisely comparative reflection on different cases that allows for reflexivity and constitutes new research value. Adopting this perspective, we have recognized the need to take into account national and international (European) as well as global levels and to realize that the meaning of ‘provincialism’ is determined at the specific intersection of these variables. Following Pickvance (1986, p. 162), Robinson (2011, p. 2) argues that comparing ‘apparently divergent urban experiences’ makes us aware of the complex diversity of urban phenomena as well as of causal patterns that can offer plausible explanations of those phenomena. Gauging degrees and kinds of such diversity justifies approaching the task of comparative analysis from an interdisciplinary angle, for this is how we can effectively highlight both similar and different logics of urban outcomes. In other words, there is no single master model of what constitutes the unit of comparison. Instead of universalizing comparative strategies applicable to many cases based commonly on quantitative and statistical procedures, we can turn to ‘variation finding strategies applied to fewer case studies using qualitative and historical methods’ (Robinson, 2011, p. 9). In this study, we aim to find variation only within certain kind of cultural field to which star architectural projects are applied as anticipated vehicles of social change (arts and sciences). Today such relating diverse cities to each other becomes more common, aiming to document benefits of ‘multi-sited individualising comparison’ (e.g. Tuvikene, Neves Alves, & Hilbrandt, 2017). It is in this context that relating our cases to the Bilbao story works only as a general reference and not as the benchmark for matching the initial conditions.

What this meant practically for this project was that guided by a few aforementioned definitions, we drew on a variety of techniques of data gathering and analyses derived from architecture, urban planning and design, cultural sociology and economic geography. They were aimed at reconstructing the cases and understanding different patterns of transformation brought about by what we termed ‘star architectural projects’. First, we conducted semi-structured narrative interviews with experts who were intimately involved with each project as well as with city officials crucial for the development of those projects. Most of the interviews were held in German. On the one hand, this gave us access to information that may not be available otherwise, and detailed knowledge about the local institutional and social conditions. On the other hand, however, it may also constitute a bias, in that a particular kind of top-down narrative related to star architecture project is being elicited. In order to control for that in some measure we decided that (1) each disciplinary team would add different questions to interviews that formed the core of our methodology and (2) we would utilize a range of additional techniques to collect and analyse discursive and visual data.

To account for a broader range of narratives, we have included both primary and secondary sources. Following Jensen (2007), we have conducted additional interviews with the inhabitants of the cities. Supplementing textual data of the interviews, we have focused on the analysis of archival material that included documents related to urban planning laws, development strategies, urban architectural plans, competition briefs and economic data on cash flows and organizational structures. Morphological transformation

has been researched through observation and analysis of photographic material and maps. Media analysis also played a crucial role in the reconstruction of the cases. On the one hand, we looked at ‘how’ the star architectural projects were covered in various media and, on the other hand, ‘what’ frequency and distribution of information about them was the case. Whenever relevant, the Lexis Nexis database for the period between 1980 and 2016 was consulted and resulted in the assessment of the total amount of media coverage on the case at hand as well as the prevailing topics of the relevant coverage. The research of Avery database and selected newspaper archives were also consulted and resulted in a long time frame analysis of the development of media coverage of the star architects and their respective works. This work on quantitative data made it possible for us to gauge topic prevalence as well as relative changes in categories that we used as selection criteria. For example, Zaha Hadid celebrity status and visibility when commissioned as the architect for Phaeno in Wolfsburg were significantly lower than today. In addition, ethnographic engagement with the projects in situ took place. We visited the cities and the buildings multiple times, together and individually. We held workshops in the cities engaging with local professionals.

On top of all that we have adopted, the following interpretive scheme that enabled us to make sense of the stories we encountered in the course of our research and which proved useful to reconstruct the cases. Rather than looking at each star architecture as a static ‘object’, we approached these cases in a processual fashion that heuristically distinguishes between different phases of their life cycle, namely initiation, design, implementation and appropriation. Architecture has ‘social life’ and it is a complex social performance featuring unique relations between actors, audiences, and means of material and symbolic production. Hence, our use of the term ‘star architectural projects’ rather than ‘buildings’, stressing the unfolding in time according to various constraints and assets present in each location. These projects are not only material interventions but also specific narratives that enter master narratives of their respective cities and broader cultural discourses. Our interpretation included also a phenomenological engagement with the studied situations. It was informed by the observation of Yaneva (2012, p. 110) who wrote that ‘buildings provoke profound transformations of the facets of their environments, they generate subjectivities and they reinvent entirely contextual relationships’. This way of unpacking complexity, confronted with different plausible narratives within and across the three case studies is not only a working approach of this research but is considered one of the key findings that emerged out of it.

4. Empirical discussion

In what follows, we present the three cases separately. Although a problem-oriented empirical discussion weaving the stories together might also be effective as a tool of juxtaposition, it is the socio-historical and morphological situatedness of each star architectural project that strikes us as key fact. The projects feature different kinds of cultural flagship institutions and they achieve a degree of intended iconicity via a different place-specific set of strategies. Because we find that there is no one role attributable to ‘star architecture’ but rather plural context-dependent roles, we have tried to trace their processual unfolding in each situation. We start off with Graz, the second biggest Austrian city and former Habsburg residence that experienced a degree of provincialisation after the

Second World War and a subsequent revitalization after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. A symbol of this new era was the distinction of the European Capital of Culture (ECOC) in 2003 for which Kunsthaus was the architectural showcase. We then move to a placid Swiss city of Lucerne located on a lake in the Alps. It has comparable historical relevance for its country, yet its new star building houses a very different cultural institution. The project is Culture and Congress Centre Lucerne (KKL) featuring a state-of-the-art concert hall, the new home of the long-standing International Lucerne Festival. KKL was designed to enhance Lucerne’s self-understanding as ‘city of music’ and to upgrade its cultural facilities. If these two cases feature typical cultural flagships whose meanings are partly subsumable to the discourse of revitalization through cultural enhancement, Wolfsburg might be seen as a unique outlier, an industrial city that is ‘not’ in decline and whose very short history is essentially linked with the Volkswagen factory. Here the star architectural project ‘Phaeno’ is an educational science centre for children. It came to the city not so much to enhance its cultural standing, which was not there in the first place, but rather to put a new spin on Wolfsburg’s technical narrative and at the same time make a strong urban statement independent of the company.

4.1. Kunsthaus in Graz

Graz is the second largest Austrian city after Vienna with roughly two hundred eighty thousand inhabitants. It is also the capital of Styria, located at the southern peripheral end of Austria, and historically a hub for a broader area comprising various regions of neighbouring states. That international role was closely related to Graz’s status of a Habsburg residence. Within the political frame of the nineteenth-century Austro-Hungarian Empire, the connections to other cities of the Empire were particularly significant. This structure came to an abrupt close in 1918. The geopolitical changes following the First World War and later the sharp break with the countries to the east instituted by the Iron Curtain meant the fragmentation of the region and relative marginalization of the city (Karner, 2012, pp. 128–174). Hence, a decisive ambiguity in Graz’s modern history: on the one hand, rich traditions and regional networks, on the other hand dwindling importance in the wake of the decline of the empire. The reality of Cold War division of Europe consigned Graz to a position of a distant borderland with severed cultural and economic ties that had previously defined its strength. It was a rather stagnant period, evidenced by little demographic change, from 220,000 inhabitants in 1946 to 237,000 in 1989 (Magistrat Graz, 2017, pp. 4–7). This situation began to change only after the Autumn of Nations in 1989.

The ambiguity of Graz’s worth can be discerned in the city’s urban fabric dissected by the river Mur (Figure 2). The east side of the river in the city center which is called Altstadt preserved material culture of aristocracy and middle classes with their museums and university around the castle hill. The west side of the river in the city center, called the Murvorstadt, has remained a working-class district serving the east side until the end of the twentieth century, with little on aesthetic and cultural offer (Dienes, 2009; Kubinzky, 2009). To an extent, the relation between the two was that of a front stage/backstage dynamic. Because the west side of the river was the industrial part of the city it also sustained war damage. This asymmetry of importance is reflected in the UNESCO world heritage status bequeathed at first only to the city’s historic core on the east bank in

Figure 2. Comparison of figureground plans of cities. This juxtaposition shows the different morphological contexts and the respective position of the examined buildings in the cities. First two images illustrate the historical development of built environment. The third image makes clear the imposing presence of the VW factory. Source: Kauder, D., Pape, T., Siemers, P. 2017 (openstreetmap.org, Dec. 2016).

1999, and then partially extended to the other side of the river to include the Eggenberg castle and the connecting axis of Annenstrasse in 2010 (UNESCO, 2016). It was the intervening role of the ECOC which Graz assumed in 2003 that presented itself as a decisive opportunity to figuratively bridge the morphological divide of the city, and which indeed was utilized as a key transition event. Being the architectural showcase of ECOC located at the under-represented bank of the river, Kunsthaus literally created a space for a new interpretation of the relation between the two city parts in an unprecedented gesture of morphological integration and cultural internationalization. In the words of Gerhard Ablasser (2016), director of urban development in Graz, it was about trying to overcome the barriers in a double sense, first between both sides of the river Mur, and also between Graz and the world. There was, however, also a crucial national dimension to this development, whereby other Austrian cities served as the key reference point or an intuitive benchmark of comparative dynamism. The two second-tier Austrian urban centres of Salzburg and Innsbruck have since the 1970s continuously registered more media attention than Graz. Moreover, Salzburg and Innsbruck have also much higher tourist numbers than Graz (Figure 3).

In short, Graz contextualized its repositioning efforts at three different levels: local urban dynamics, national dynamics and internationally. The architectural competition for Kunsthaus was launched in 1999, just a year after the decision for hosting ECOC in Graz was made by the EU. The architects Peter Cook and Colin Fournier were chosen to realize the project. They engaged in building a structure geared towards 'an exhibition

Figure 3. Comparison of media presence in the New York Times and overnight stays. Graz is compared to Linz, Innsbruck and Salzburg because these four cities form a class of main national competitors on the cultural level. On both accounts, Graz lags behind the Alpine city of Innsbruck and especially Salzburg. Source: Dreher, J. and Kauder, D. 2017 (Statistik Austria 2016; Stadt Salzburg 2016; LexisNexis, 2016).

centre of contemporary art that shows international trends in regular, changing exhibitions, placing these in both a national and regional context’ (Universalmuseum Joanneum, 2017). This fitted the ECOC agenda of Graz. In fact, Wolfgang Lorenz (2016), the director of ECOC Graz, assumed his duties on the condition that new prominent Kunsthaus be built in the city. According to him, the Kunsthaus’ symbolic value is twofold: (1) boosting self-confidence of the inhabitants and (2) creating a new forward-looking icon for Graz. The inauguration and development of Kunsthaus in Murvorstadt was to be staged as a spectacular event within the broader program of ECOC, whereby the latter was understood as the gateway to urban repositioning and the former as a key vehicle for it.

In the process of repositioning of Graz, the Kunsthaus plays different roles in different moments and contextualizations. First of all, it was a part of a broader cluster of events that comprise ECOC which has been politically utilized as a revitalization measure since 1990 when Glasgow had pioneered such an urban strategy. Leitner (2012, p. 135ff) argues that Kunsthaus has been only one of 111 projects for urban regeneration in Graz’s central districts that were initiated for 2003. However, as European events of this magnitude typically incentivize a range of preparatory changes, there were various actions for the enhancement of urban infrastructure implemented even earlier (Leitner, 2012, p. 167). Thus, the interpretation of the Kunsthaus as the sole impetus for change is post-rationalized (Leitner, 2012, p. 168). To an extent, the Kunsthaus has become a grand symbol for a successful revitalization of the west side of the Mur in Graz (Pakesch, 2016). However, the long-term international relevance in terms of media presence or tourism is questionable as the relative numbers of relevant articles in The New York Times and relative growth of overnight stays did not register considerable turning points (see Figure 3).

The number of visitors to Kunsthaus is even declining since 2003 (Universalmuseum Joanneum, 2016). We are talking here about the number of ‘exhibition visitors which is different from the phenomenon of architourism’ (Jonkhans, 2016), i.e. people drawn to behold the building up close. This, of course, brought about a controversial debate about what counts for more. Varying expectations attached to the Kunsthaus had grown in Graz over decades due to the protracted debates about various initiatives for a new exhibition space of modern art in Graz. This process included two prior architectural competitions and in-depth research regarding its urban location. As far as the Kunsthaus was concerned, the urban site just across the river, as well as being conceived of as the showcase for 2003 have become clear priorities (Lorenz, 2016).

The morphological and material integration of Kunsthaus at this strategic site on the main river bridge signified a potential for a reinterpretation of the separation of Graz by the river. The Kunsthaus that is often called ‘friendly alien’ (Bogner, 2004) is ‘perfectly integrated within the statutory building alignments’ (Rosmann, 2016). As Niels Jonkhans (2016), the leading project architect says, ‘it is an amorphous form that in its silhouette and ground plan smoothly adapts to its surroundings’. As such the building defines the urban space on the river and creates a gate entrance to Murvorstadt. By the same token, this means a morphological emancipation of both sides of the river (Figure 4). Through its amoeba-like form and its high tech blue outer veneer without windows, the building comes across self-confidently vis-à-vis the old core of the town. While the Kunsthaus is hardly visually present in the Murvorstadt, its characteristic façade turned toward the old town across the river is reinforced by a multimedia veneer activated at night. This new interpretation becomes even more pronounced when looking at the city from the

Schlossberg mountain, which is a viewpoint of great significance both for the visitors and inhabitants alike (Bogensberger, 2016), the exact vista used also in Guardian’s feature on Graz included in the list of key ‘alternative city breaks in Europe’ (Coldwell, 2016). From here the prominent ‘blue blob’ (Bogner, 2004) nested within the characteristic uniform structure of a red roof landscape shifts the horizon of the centre of Graz away and over the river Mur (Figure 4), coming across as ‘space age facade that resembles a giant illuminated alien blob’ (Coldwell, 2016). While the role of the Kunsthaus for an internationalization of Graz, or as the sole impetus for urban regeneration has to be relativized, the reevaluation of the relations between the two sides of the river can be regarded as the gateway for a development towards the west side of the city (Bogensberger, 2016). The role of Kunsthaus as a morphological shift as well as the international showcase for ECOC 2003 was partly ensured by the choice of provocative architect, Peter Cook, who until then had not realized any significant building. However, he was well-known in international architectural circles due to his work in the Archigram group famous for its utopian concepts and designs of the 1960s. The architect’s profile, therefore, could not and did not contribute to the project’s global media fame, unlike in the case of Zaha Hadid’s work in Wolfsburg we discuss below. Yet it did ensure the coherence of its ‘symbolic message for a new generation’ and morphological transformation (Lorenz, 2016). This specifically urban role of a star architectural project utilized as a response to the historically determined internal dynamics amounts to being a crucial part of urban

re-evaluation in Graz, whereby a new spin is put on the city’s own logic. As the next case of Lucerne will show, such morphological dynamics was also in place there but the emphasis was shifted toward reinforcement of the existing sets of urban narratives in service of maintaining and enhancing the city’s main cultural self-understanding.

4.2. KKL in Lucerne

As a showcase of contemporary architecture, the Culture and Convention Centre Lucerne (KKL) resides prominently on the shore of the Lake Lucerne in central Switzerland. It is situated in the placid core of a small city with about 80,000 inhabitants (Lustat, 2016), which is only an hour away from Zurich and itself ‘a tourist magnet by virtue of its idyllic setting in an imposing panorama of mountains’ (Rehsteiner, 2016). According to the former city architect Jean Pierre Deville (2016), this specific embeddedness of the grandness of KKL places it within an ‘ever present contrast in Lucerne between a petty provincial attitude of the old town and a somehow baroque aspiration for a metropolitan mentality’. Inaugurated as a whole in June 2000, the KKL as a structure of international stature has been designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel and his partner Emmanuel Cattani. Composed of three primary volumes that are connected by a service wing in the back, the physical structure hosts a high-quality Concert Hall, a multi-purpose Lucerne Hall and an international Congress Centre, including an Art Museum and a variety of gastronomic services (Bühlmann, 1998, p. 23). All these different functions are unified under an immense, horizontal and cantilevered roof construction protruding towards the lake (Nouvel & Tonka, 1999). In its staged communication with other landmarks like the iconic wooden chapel bridge, the old town and the luxury hotel scenery, it lends itself to frame the ‘typical postcard view of Lucerne in its alpine setting’ (Rehsteiner, 2016/see Figure 5 top). This is an image that according to the present city architect Jürg Rehsteiner (2016) ‘probably represents in its thickest possible form what a tourist imagines as Switzerland’.

As imposing as the natural scenery of Lucerne might be, it has to be set up, staged and performed in order to be properly experienced (Bosshard & Luchsinger, 1997, p. 2). And this is how any urban narrative is understood in this discussion on the role of KKL in repositioning Lucerne. The ‘star architecture’ of KKL is thereby not effective as an isolated object but as a spatio-temporal performance that gains its signification through different degrees of participation in related urban narratives and experiential configurations. While master narratives of the city develop historically over extended periods of time, Lucerne’s aforementioned ‘bourgeois cosmopolitanism has always been strongly influenced by tourism … and a great jump from a medieval and Catholic little town on the river to a tourist “city of music” that presents itself at the lake’ (Deville, 2016/Figure 5 bottom left). Already at the end of the nineteenth century and with the development of Lucerne’s famous hotel scenery at the north shore of the lake, the city positioned itself as a luxury branded tourist destination close to nature (Bosshard & Luchsinger, 1997, p. 5). While Lucerne had little to do with industrialization, it ever since performed as a placid small town that nevertheless exudes some bigger city feel. Over one hundred years later and after a doubling of the population in the centre, this characteristic urban narrative arguably only upgraded. Through the introduction of the International Music Festival in the 1930s (today ‘Lucerne Festival’), the liaison between tourism and high culture had

Figure 5. Story of framing and reflecting historical urban narratives of Lucerne. The upper image is the view from the Old Town towards the lake and the mountains with hotel scenery on the left and KKL on the right. The left column represents the historical development of Lucerne in figure-ground plans. The right column refers to the morphology and materiality of the architecture. Source: photo Pape, T. and maps by Kauder, D., Pape, T., Siemers, P. 2016.

successfully been established, ‘the coronation of which is the KKL’ (Schumacher, 2015, p. 210). Moreover, KKL is not only a culmination of a well-established social process but crucially occupies a prominent urban site on which other important cultural institutions once stood. Its direct predecessor on this site was the Culture and Congress House (KKH) designed by Armin Meili in 1933 (Sine Nomine, 1935; Figure 5 centre left). While the KKH ‘always remained somehow comical in its withdrawn small dimensions’ standing next to the big railway station (Bosshard & Luchsinger, 1997, p. 31), the KKL on the same urban site ‘presents itself confidently as new landmark for Lucerne’ (Bitterli Mucha, 2016). The debate about a new concert hall (and possibly a new Culture and Congress Centre) in the 1980s stemmed from the deficiencies of the Meili building which could not accommodate the growing Lucerne Festival and was in bad need for general overhaul (Stadt Luzern, 1988; Held, 2016). That predicament became conspicuous toward the end of the twentieth century when the process of reunification of the continent after 1989 posed new challenges in the international music scene. With the KKH no longer compliant with the up-scale requirements of this scene as a flagship of high culture in Lucerne, the debate had been accompanied by an ‘omnipresent fear that other cities could take over the music festival’ (Deville, 2016). It is therefore only reasonable that the high-quality Concert Hall developed by the star-acoustician Russel Johnson became the showcase of the KKL.

The KKL as home of the Lucerne Festival not only takes up, elevates and adds to long-established relation with an international music scene but it alters strictly local dynamics by occupying a historically important site in the city. Here its orientation towards the lake stands exemplary for a reinforcement of the liaison between high culture and tourism, meaningfully entangled into the natural setting. The architecture with a backstage service area shields this high cultural representation from the industrial and service district behind the nearby railway station. While the ‘south side of the lake with the city districts Neustadt and Tribschenstadt had been one of the areas with the highest development potential for Lucerne’ in the 1990s when the KKL was designed and built (Deville, 2016; Rehsteiner, 2016), Nouvel reproduced the established unilateral orientation towards the lake. At the same time, it could be argued that this backstage/front stage divide was only the logical consequence of some general planning decisions from the late 1980s, which established a clear morphological separation through the construction of huge volumes of service buildings behind the KKH (Rehsteiner, 2011). KKL’s staging of the relations towards the lake and the hotel scenery is made even stronger by means of the fully differentiated morphology and materiality of Nouvel’s architecture. His design is a story of framing and reflecting the surrounding cultural and natural landscape (Nouvel & Tonka, 1999; Figure 5 right).

Sensibly incorporating various gradations of historically grown narratives, the KKL also adds radical new interpretations. For instance, the cantilevered roof design forms KKL’s penetrating interaction with the water. For the first time in the history of Lucerne, the lake itself is morphologically and hence socio-culturally incorporated as part of the city. Corresponding with the bend of the southern bank, the roof additionally re-evaluated public space in the centre of Lucerne with ‘the Inseli around the corner of the KKL becoming an important social meeting point since the early 2000s’ (Geissbühler, 2016). None of the above aspects stands on its own. They only unfold jointly, each as an indispensable part of a delicate holistic performance of the locally meaningful architectural project. Rosi

Bitterli Mucha (2016), head of cultural affairs of the city, emphasizes the significance of the project by saying that ‘the respect for and the protection of the integrity of this architecture is decisively linked to the aura of the star-architect Nouvel’. This holistic performance of the architectural project develops embedded in the city’s internal logic.

At the same time, this is constantly challenged through political and social dynamics that have to be carefully mediated especially when greater public interests are concerned. In the case of KKL as a publicly funded large-scale project, the negotiation processes of its initiation phase illuminate the co-creation of related urban narratives. The idea of a new Culture and Congress Centre at the lake in the late 1980s fell into a political climate of a loosening of the traditional antipodes of liberal state and political Catholicism (Zimmer, 2003, pp. 190–195). In Lucerne as a cultural and intellectual centre of Switzerland, this dynamic has led to new economic impulses in the 1990s, especially in the educational sector, but also to a sharpening of its touristic profile (Schumacher, 2015, p. 205). The successful story of the public vote for the new KKL in the specific context of the Swiss democracy needs to be related to a few key actors and within the changing dynamics in urban planning discourses of the time. This means a growing importance of participatory and cooperative planning, awareness of urban heritage and alternative cultural landscapes as much as Lucerne’s specific decline of population and regression in tourism (Deville, 2016; Held, 2016; Rehsteiner, 2016). While the role of Nouvel was crucial for the fundraising process, especially in the early phase of the project (Held, 2016), the mayor Kurzmeyer and the project manager Held have made the majority vote of 65.76% for the KKL in June 1994 possible through political mediation of aforementioned prevalent urban discourses (Deville, 2016; Bühlmann, 1998). When discussing the role of KKL in repositioning Lucerne, this decision has to be considered as having far-reaching sociocultural and economic impact long before the first stone of the building has been placed. Only three months after the majority vote for KKL, the ‘Schweizer Hof’ hotel requested a permission for necessary renovation for up-scale tourism in spite of its heritage protection which had stalled its upgrades before. In this request, the hotel referred directly to the demolition of Meili building and the decision to build new KKL (Stadt Luzern, 1994).

While the following series of renovations of the grand hotels of Lucerne can be regarded as a structural effect of the KKL (Scherer, Strauf, & Bieger, 2002, p. 32), in the overall dynamic of a declining role of the luxury hotel business in tourism the hotel renovations are considered only of interim significance. For the urban narrative of Lucerne as a luxury tourist destination, however, the preservation of the postcard aesthetic of the hotel scenery arguably influences the urban development of the city far beyond any present and measurable economic effect (Omachen, 2011, p. 12). In order to understand the role of KKL for future urban development of Lucerne, also the increasing relevance of the city performance within the whole agglomeration of about 200,000 inhabitants has to be considered (Wüest & Partner, 2011; Bundesamt für Statistik, 2016; Rehsteiner, 2016). Consequently, the ‘retelling’ of Lucerne’s postcard view through the KKL is a keynote only when referring to its tourist profile. With less than 15% of the added value related to tourism (Hornung, 2011, p. 32), the KKL can be regarded as a successful story only insofar as directly related urban discourses are concerned. The introduction of KKL is a form of preservation and enhancement of luxury heritage and tourist assets. The next case illustrates what happens when none of such assets are present, and the mundane industrial city attempts to reinvent itself instead.

4.3. Phaeno in Wolfsburg

Wolfsburg is a German city of roughly one hundred twenty thousand inhabitants. While for last two decades its population has neither increased nor dwindled, the urban fabric underwent notable transformations during the period. Being a relatively young city, with history dating back only to the 1930s, Wolfsburg was planned from scratch by the Nazi authorities as an industrial settlement adjacent to the KdF car factory, later Volkswagen (VW). The city’s fate has been intertwined with the fortunes of the company ever since, from its grand outset to the massive emissions scandal in 2015. A set of peculiar developmental ramifications ensued from this historical conditioning. First, Wolfsburg’s inception is symbolically polluted as a showcase of the Nazi era and VW’s vaguely acknowledged use of slave labour during the war. Second, comparative lack of historic depth has meant few symbolic and cultural resources that could be mobilized to offset VW’s overshadowing influence, from its ‘original sin’ to the recent scandal. Third, the city is said to have suffered from the lack of consolidated centre, the condition deplored as its ‘birth defect’ by urban researchers (Herlyn, Tessin, Harth, & Schneller, 2012) and journalists alike (Berglieb, 2016, p. 15). Wolfsburg did benefit materially from the massive growth of VW. However, having relied for its development mostly on economic capital of this one industry, the city hardly accumulated any other nationally and internationally significant symbolic currency. In short, until the last decade of the twentieth century, the globality of Volkswagen’s brand was coupled with the lingering provinciality of its host city (Figure 1). This asymmetry, partly occasioned by insufficient translation of economic capital into the symbolic one (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 242), constituted a liability for the city’s character and ultimately for its attractiveness too.

This predicament was exacerbated by the post-industrial economic shifts of the 1990’s, which rendered mass industrial production potentially more vulnerable. That was locally evidenced by a recession that Wolfsburg witnessed in 1992. By the same token, culture industries and tourism became more salient, especially for small and medium-sized cities (Baerenholdt & Haldrup, 2006, p. 209), which meant that change in the cultural sector became present in policy agendas more than ever before (Tlili, 2008, p. 125). Indeed, the shortage of translocally recognized cultural identity increasingly vexed Wolfsburg’s image management. It is this constellation of conditions that rendered Wolfsburg ripe for repositioning as ‘image reconstruction’ (Paddison, 1993, p. 339) and ‘urban-spatial restructuring of regional city’ (Shin, 2014). In what follows, we take these two interlocking aspects to reconstruct the roles of Phaeno for repositioning of Wolfsburg. We begin with outlining the socio-historical frame in which this project made sense to municipal authorities and assumed significance.

Historically layered and newer social configurations shape how local knowledge is valorized and translated to place identity (Kneafsey, 2000, p. 35). Martina Löw talks about ‘city’s own logic’ in this respect (Löw, 2008). Wolfsburg’s industrial ‘monoculture’ of sorts was the pivot around which its logic unravelled. ‘Other cities have cathedrals, Wolfsburg has VW’ (Büchse in Beil, 2016, p. 18). In fact, during the formative decades, it was almost as if the factory hosted the town, not the other way around (Figure 2), a situation where ‘nothing happened in Wolfsburg without VW’, as Wolfsburg’s former mayor Schnellecke (2016) noted. Monika Thomas (2016), Wolfsburg’s urban development councilor, notes that she knows of no other city that is so ‘mono structured by one company’.

In the long run, despite the dependency on Volkswagen, the city has been comparatively stable in socio-economic terms and gradually evolved alongside the factory, becoming a special case of an industrial town that has 'not' declined in the post-industrial era.

Alas, this relative stability was no antidote to what a major German daily called the 'sadness of the planned settlement': Wolfsburg has not been a city, rather an 'extension of the industrial zone' (Berglieb, 2016), with little on state-of-the-art entertainment offer and few place-specific icons. Morphologically, a strict separation of living and working areas has been in place for most of the city's existence (Figure 2). The former director of Wolfsburg's planning office Jürgen Zwengel (2016) notes that still in the 1990's Wolfsburg was only 'slowly becoming self-conscious as a city'. Moreover, the geopolitics of the Cold War compounded Wolfsburg's geo-cultural peripherality. The city was an outlier in West Germany due to the division of Germany that lasted between 1949 and 1989. East Germany used to be ten kilometres away from Wolfsburg, thus making it a kind of 'end of the world' in West Germany. For Joe Ansel (2016), exhibition curator for Phaeno, the mission of the science centre emerged out of that combination of provinciality and relative lack of distinction. 'What Wolfsburg lacked was critical mass. It's not that there was nothing there, there wasn't enough there. Then the wall comes down. And they're thinking: what can we do to distinguish us in some sense'. Economic vulnerability indicated by the unemployment of the early 1990's informed a strategic plan known as the AutoVision. Articulated by the consultancy firm McKinsey for the city and funded by VW, the AutoVision specifically called for a 'new positioning' of Wolfsburg and recommended reorientation toward 'Wolfsburg as experience world'. The idea was to gradually develop Wolfsburg into a unique destination for short-trips by introducing a series of flagship projects (McKinsey & Company, 1999, p. 22). Becoming a station on the new high-speed railway between Berlin and Hannover in 1998 also incentivized Wolfsburg to transform itself to a more central destination.

The decision to build Phaeno belongs to the same developmental period. Due to its strategically aligned formal and functional features, Phaeno signalled that Wolfsburg's administration was intent to enhance 'managing its spoiled identity' of a backwater industrial town (Rivera, 2008). This decision materialized when Phaeno was swiftly erected between 2003 and 2005 in the morphological and functional 'buffer zone' between the factory and residential settlements. Phaeno's projected role was to help (1) emancipate the city from the factory, (2) realize the urban potential of the main train station area and (3) regenerate and expand city's service portfolio. Insofar as Phaeno partakes in effecting those shifts, it alters Wolfsburg's urban narrative. Yet, as a new morphological feature and fresh cultural signifier, it is hardly an isolated object. Its capacity to draw attention is a complex undertaking, comprising key actors involved in the building's design and curation, their embedded practices, ideations and norms (Tlili, 2008, p. 125), place-specific mise-en-scène and target audiences. As a morphological change and cultural addition, the influence of Phaeno was also to counter the inertia of Wolfsburg's suburban experiential patterns (Nägeli, 2016). Last but not least, the choice of the special architect was paramount.

According to the Phaeno project leader and head of cultural affairs in Wolfsburg, Wolfgang Guthardt (2016), the special affinity between the city's character and the project of educational science centre made Phaeno a felicitous repositioning step. This affinity ensured that the intervention retained a sense of continuity of Wolfsburg's traditional

practical narrative. At the same time, the Phaeno’s institutional service dedicated to children’s extracurricular education meant a relatively circumscribed target audience. Moreover, the potential significance of the affinity between the city’s character and Phaeno’s practical mission could not be elaborated into a fully functional civic asset without purposeful alignment of the main urban and symbolic factors. First, and crucially, Phaeno was placed in a strategic urban site near the railway station with a potential to make an urban statement toward VW while also reacting to the VW-owned flagship project AutoStadt across the tracks. Second, Phaeno’s status of ‘star architecture’ has accrued to it by dint of employing a top-notch professional, who could endow the building with the charisma of fame and signature design. The architect chosen through competition was Zaha Hadid. In the early 2000s, she was only on her way to world status, but that timing suited Wolfsburg well, for the city needed the maximum of the promising architect’s attention (Wang, 2016), especially under its budgetary constraints. Indications that the city of Wolfsburg was indeed looking for a star architect to design the science centre are present in the architecture competition brief itself, which asks for an architecture that would live up to the legacy of internationally acclaimed Scharoun and Aalto (Wolfsburg SWvdNG, 1999, p. 2).

Hadid introduced a structure that contrasts starkly with residential architecture and is able to face factory confidently (Figure 6). But by employing a stripped down, monochromatic design, the building came across to some citizens as insufficiently differentiated from its industrial environment, especially its ‘back’ side facing VW across the tracks. Some experts assert that Phaeno’s architectural language that conceals structural elements to achieve sculptural semiotic power departs from Wolfsburg’s mundane character (Nägeli, 2016). This degree of ambiguity about the flagship aspiration and main meanings of Phaeno was detected among the inhabitants by Harth et al. (2010), and is also admitted by Guthardt (2016) who mentioned some citizens’ reluctance to fully embrace it and

Figure 6. Phaeno vis-à-vis VW factory in Wolfsburg. The independent geometrical logic of Zaha Hadid’s shaping counteracts the all-powerful Fordist logic of the VW factory. Source: Bartmanski, D. 2016.

endorse follow-up initiatives of a similar kind. At the same time, 71% of the inhabitants found the concerted effort of the various flagship projects developed in Wolfsburg in last 20 years beneficial to the city life as a whole (Harth, Herlyn, Scheller, & Tessin, 2010, pp. 137–139).

At the same time, the ambiguity of Phaeno’s morphological expression became an important feature in the narrative of making a strong urban statement vis-à-vis the VW factory, and therefore becoming more autonomous as a city. While Phaeno might not be unanimously praised by the citizens as Wolfsburg’s most beloved landmark, it is a unique urban touchstone nonetheless, the unprecedented intervention confident in its language of dimensions and intent vis-à-vis Volkswagen. As the city’s own major contribution and as a vehicle for the development of the northern part of the centre, Phaeno anchored the first acknowledged centre of Wolfsburg, and thus perhaps made Wolfsburg feeling like a ‘real city’ for the first time. Also when it comes to its international media presence, ‘Phaeno the edifice’ branded by Zaha Hadid figures more prominently than ‘Phaeno the institution’. In the Lexis Nexis database, Phaeno as a media topic is more associated with Zaha Hadid’s architecture than its science exhibitions. This reflects Hadid’s steadily rising international profile. From winning the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 2004 to The Guardian’s 2007 listing of Phaoen as one of the 12 most significant modern works of architecture in the world (Glancey, 2007), the architect and her Wolfsburg project came to full-fledged prominence. Thus the city underwent a degree of repositioning at once as a morphological and symbolic space.

5. Conclusion

Having analysed three urban cases, we collated different situations which nevertheless share certain characteristics. What transpired in our empirical cases is that the cities find themselves negotiating the meanings of their local heritage, or what we referred to here as their own logic, and their future-related aspirations informed by more global trends. This balancing act is typically mediated by the binary coding of locality and globality, provinciality and cosmopolitanism. Although powerful, these binaries are in each case intersected by the national dimension that provides a kind of structural intermediary. That is to say, local and global factors are refracted through the national context of comparisons between medium-sized cities on the European scale (e.g. Graz vs other Austrian cities), or through geopolitical history and repositioning within a given country and the city itself (e.g. Wolfsburg). Star architectural projects mean a process of transforming material and symbolic urban space, whereby a whole city can be ‘repositioned’.

The talk about such urban repositioning has often been accompanied either by the liberal discourse of the ‘Bilbao effect’ or critical discourses of iconic architecture as an instrument of capitalist domination. As we tried to show, however, despite compelling insights, both discourses have economistic bias we tried to eschew. Looking at the renovation of hotel scenery in Lucerne as KKL’s structural effect provides an exemplary reason. Although economic aspects have been important as one of the motivating forces, the significance of the Lucerne’s renovated hotels manifests only partly in the proportion of economic value added for Lucerne (Hornung, 2011, p. 32), especially when compared with the symbolic and morphological relevance of the preservation of Lucerne’s postcard

view that has cross-generational importance. Therefore, we treated the buildings as embedded social performances of enduring cultural value. Emphasizing ‘performative situatedness’ implies that ‘star architecture’ is not an automatic replicable formula or effect of buildings but rather a broad genre of urban transformation that varies across time and space contexts. This necessitates comparative perspective between dissimilar cases which, as Robinson (2011) shows, is permissible but nevertheless vulnerable. Including three empirical instances opens up rich situational continuum but it makes them illustrative rather than exhaustive. Mindful of the fact that access to comparative data may be – and often is – restricted in such sensitive cases, we focused on an interdisciplinary investigation that stresses field-specific qualitative evaluation of the urban situation.

If star architectural projects provoke profound transformations, they reinvent contextual relationships. This raises the problem of complexity of changes. The proposed way of unpacking this complexity by revealing the entwinement of their multiple roles is a major finding. The notion of situatedness of star architectural projects helps here because it (1) captures relationally constituted conditions that trigger the decisions to initiate such projects and (2) underlines the significance of variability of heritage resources, and local and national historical backgrounds that shape eventual outcomes. The critical importance of the latter becomes clear when we juxtapose the cases of Graz and Wolfsburg, where the abundance of historical and symbolic resources of the first one contrasts starkly with the lack of such assets in the second. The global economic power of Volkswagen company, whose creation occasioned the founding of Wolfsburg, can never redress the paucity of intangible values of local heritage. In fact, the emancipation from the factory was pivotal even if the city opted for maintaining its utilitarian technical narrative rather than for cultural revitalization of a kind we observed in Graz and Lucerne. Those differences aside, all three situations sensitize us to how place-specific urban logic inflects generic notion of repositioning.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
This work was supported by DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) [grant number KO 5090/1-1, LO 1144/14-1, TH 1334/11-1].

ORCID
Nina Alaily-Mattar http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5713-6548
Alain Thierstein http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1878-4862

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