Vienna, Austria
ARTEC Architekten

ARTEC lends a theatrical flair to the Zum Löwen Von Aspern pharmacy on the fringes of Vienna

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	Photo © Margherita Spiluttini
	Bettina Götz and Richard Manahl
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Theatrical pharmaceuticals may sound like an oxymoron, but the idea is not so farfetched for Vienna—a place rife with musicals, parades, balls, cabarets, jazz clubs, operas, concerts, and variety shows. On the city’s eastern outskirts, near the Löwen von Aspern (a sculpture of a lion commemorating the decisive battle here between Hapsburg and Napoleonic forces), the roar of drama reverberates even in the design of a small drugstore. Apotheke zum Löwen von Aspern stands on Vienna’s tattered fringe, along a service road leading to the Lower Austrian countryside. Nothing in the site’s drab, low-rise surroundings would have earmarked it for an aesthetically remarkable pharmacy. Quite the contrary.

But the apothecary’s owner, Wilhelm Schlagintweit, was a man with a mission. After partnering with Phoenix, a wholesale pharmaceutical company focused on “wellness,” he set out to transcend the usual drugstore offerings. Catering to the influx of suburban yuppies who populate the hip, new single-family houses just a short drive or bike ride from his site, Schlagintweit envisioned a store that would provide coaching in wellness, homeopathic and herbal medicines, and nutrition, along with general advice on Phoenix cosmetics.

To set the stage for this new venture, the owner turned to ARTEC, a relatively young architecture firm from Graz, Austria—known, perhaps not surprisingly, for residential and commercial designs attuned to hip tastes. Founded in the late 1990s by Bettina Götz and Richard Manahl, the practice was among the first of its generation to embrace a stark Minimalist aesthetic, breaking with the Deconstructivism of the so-called “Graz School.”

Always seeking what Götz terms “the simple form of the complex,” ARTEC responded to Schlagintweit by creating a modest building with a striking interior, distinguished by its spare and dramatic edge. A quiet, 50-foot-wide glazed facade invites views into the 1,350-square-foot space, revealing walls of exposed concrete and floors of polished Confalt (a mixture of asphalt and green-tinted cement that is like terrazzo, but not as hard).

In a spirit akin to the stark stage designs of such dramatists as Robert Wilson, special lighting effects set the mood here. Wide bands of incandescent light stretch up the walls and across the ceiling, wrapping the perimeters of the display cases that hang from above as if suspended weightlessly on glowing wings of light. Abstractly, these aluminum cabinets allude to the mythological phoenix from which the pharmaceutical company takes its name.

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