World Famous Architects Design Bus Stops for Tiny Austrian Village

Krumbach, a small Austrian village of 1000 inhabitants, is not the place you’d expect to find structures from a variety of architecture’s biggest names. But thanks to Verein Kultur Krumbach, a new association dedicated to encouraging culture in the village, that’s exactly what’s happening, with seven international architecture firms agreeing to design bus stops for Krumbach.

Krumbach, a small Austrian village of 1000 inhabitants, is not the place you’d expect to find structures from a variety of architecture’s biggest names. But thanks to Verein Kultur Krumbach, a new association dedicated to encouraging culture in the village, that’s exactly what’s happening, with seven international architecture firms agreeing to design bus stops for Krumbach.

With a small budget for their BUS:STOP project, all that Kultur Krumbach had to offer the designers was a free holiday in the region and the freedom of a design typology stripped to its bare essentials: a small, pavilion-like shelter. This proved enticing enough that within four weeks, the project had attracted Alexander Brodsky, RintalaEggertsson Architects, Architecten de Vylder Vinck Taillieu, Ensamble Studio, Smiljan Radic, Sou Fujimoto, and Amateur Architecture Studio (Wang Shu‘s Practice).

These practices were chosen for the fact that, despite being well known in the architecture world, they were still “just small offices with sculptural interest.” Working in collaboration with local architects, they have designed shelters using local materials and making “comparisons between different vocabularies and schools of thought, between east and west, north and south.”