TOWER OF AMRAS

Art for public space Tirol 2026

A tower in Innsbruck, but not a monument. Designed for the Künstlerinnenvereinigung Tirol under the yearly theme of Seelenschwitzen, the project takes Thomas Bernhard's 'Amras' as its point of departure: a story of confinement, self-reflection, and the devouring intimacy of enclosed space. Those acquainted with Bernhard's novel know that the tower of Amras is first and foremost a dark space, imagined to devour its fictional inhabitants: the walls protect the two brothers with the obtuse voracity of a sarcophagus. The project proposes a different kind of tower: uncertain, fragmented, certainly more open. The wall that shelters is the wall that imprisons, so the tower is gutted upward, pierced from below, slashed sideways. At its center, a mirror. 

Around the mirror, fragments. The tower is built of displaced citations: elements of Ambras Castle, Innsbruck's urban fabric, and Tyrolean vernacular architecture return alongside references to Lewerentz, Rossi, Hollein, Maderna, Bernini, Czech, and Abraham. These familiar forms are distorted, abstracted, and reassembled. They are recognizable, but stripped of their clichés. A faux baroque for the passage, theatrically extroverted; an abstract closure for introspection, hermetic and still. The two registers coexist within the same structure, as if the tower could not settle on a single language.

This method of composition mirrors Bernhard's own: a writing made of fragments, mixed genres, and restless accumulation, in which known forms are recomposed into something at once familiar and estranging. The tower attempts something similar through architectural means, to use the language of architecture as a symbolically displaced form, open to public use and collective experience. In this sense, the tower also aims at becoming a counter-image of the monument: not a fixed symbol, but a temporary, public architecture: a folly that questions how we inhabit space, memory, and the weight of familiar forms.

SITE: INNSBRUCK, AUSTRIA

YEAR: 2026

TEAM: MATHIAS BANK & GIACOMO PALA

ENGINEER: TRAGWERKSPARTNER ZT GMBH

REALIZED WITH: NIKLAS BUGELNIG, DAVID CHRISTIAN, LUCA GUARINO, THOMAS OVERERLACHER, HEINRICH PAN, CHRISTOPH SCHWARZ

SPONSORS: ADLER LACKE, ROTHOBLASS INTERNATIONAL, HERMANN TSCHABRUN GMBH, PIXELPROJECT WERBETECHNIK, KÖLLENSPERGER STAHL

Photos by Moritz Orgler