Kunsthaus Graz

Kunsthaus Graz — the "Friendly Alien" designed by Peter Cook and Colin Fournier and opened in 2003 as the landmark of Graz's year as European Capital of Culture — is one of Europe's most distinctive museums of contemporary art and part of the Universalmuseum Joanneum. Its biomorphic body is clad in 1,066 translucent acrylic-glass panels (max. 2.8 × 2 m, ~300 kg each) that form both the building's signature skin and the carrier of the BIX media façade — a 900 m² matrix of 930 individually controllable fluorescent rings by realities:united, part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and listed as a protected work of design. The building sits on the bank of the River Mur directly adjacent to Graz's UNESCO World Heritage historic centre and is physically connected to the "Eisernes Haus" (1847), whose cast-iron façade is heritage-protected.

Two decades after opening, the façade system is reaching the end of its technical life: the waterproofing membrane beneath the panels is ageing and increasingly leak-prone, the façade provides insufficient thermal regulation (high cooling and heating loads to maintain museum climate conditions), and the neon tubes behind the panels can no longer be placed on the EU market. In 2026, Kunsthaus Graz therefore ran a public innovation challenge ("Innovative façade solutions for energy efficiency, weather resistance and communication", IÖB Innovationsplattform, winners announced October 2026) to identify market-ready and research-stage façade retrofits — including bio-based and recycled materials, integrated media skins, and flexible roof waterproofing for complex free-form geometries — that upgrade the envelope without altering the building's iconic geometry.