Municipal Recycling Facility
Marte.Marte Architects – Feldkirch, Austria
Built in 2014 and burned to the ground completely in March 2024 due to a battery fire, the project wasn’t intended to be a cluttered conglomeration of buildings, collection points, more or less covered, and administration areas. Instead, the entire property, following its shape, was covered: a large hall that houses all functions, a volume that allows flexible use now and in the assumed future.
Naturally, one ends up in the right place. If the gate of the recycling center is open, no one will miss it, and the route is clear. In the inviting, bright niches, you find the correct containers, which are to be filled from above.
Around the building, slightly lowered, there is a wide lane for transporting the large containers. This means that the users’ cars are directed out of the hall above and do not encounter the large trucks. This transport corridor, following the property boundary, integrates naturally between the hall and the massive existing earth wall towards Ardetzenberg, which was erected as protection against falling rocks.
It was agreed that it should be a wooden structure. In the spirit of environmental awareness and sustainability, the city of Feldkirch wanted to use the renewable resource wood and, additionally, to source the larch wood (for the entire facade) from its own city forest in the Saminatal valley.
The client also agreed to a high-quality and demanding wooden construction. The large spans (12 meters from support to support, with 15 meters in between for the passage) are solved with cross-shaped fork supports, glued and clamped into steel feet. The joints of the trusses are also made of steel. Since the main truss framework lies diagonally to the secondary truss framework, each connection point had to be measured; there was no tolerance during prefabrication.
On top of this lies the laminated timber deck, also in elements (60 cm wide, about 7.5 m long). The roof is extensively greened. The large, round light points in the ceiling make the hall appear friendly and bright. Two large sliding gates and the offices of the administrative wing on the ground floor are communicatively oriented outward towards Kapfstraße.
Text: Marina Hämmerle