Imgang Architekten Stacks a Fire Station and a Village Hall under One Timber Gable in Mötz, Tyrol

Small Alpine villages rarely get to build civic architecture, and when they do, the budget usually has to cover several needs at once. In Mötz, a Tyrolean village in the Inn valley, the municipality ran a realization competition in 2023 under the Dorferneuerung Tirol village renewal program. The goal was one compact building for the volunteer fire brigade and for the clubs and events that keep village life running. Imgang Architekten, led by Christoph Milborn, Clemens Plank and Alexandra Schmid Roner, won with a single gabled volume. It occupies the site of the old, largely vacant municipal building on Flößerweg.

What interests us is that the building does not separate its two identities. Fire stations are usually treated as sheds with an office attached, and community halls as decorated boxes. Here the engine bays, the library, the dance hall and the club rooms share one stair, one material palette and one roof. The palette is limited to three materials: exposed concrete, white fir and ash parquet. That restraint does most of the architectural work. It turns an emergency facility into something closer to a village living room that happens to house a fire truck.

A Gable That Belongs to the Valley

From above, Mötz reads as a loose cluster of pitched roofs between the river and forested slopes. At street level you meet whitewashed wayside shrines and timber barns. Imgang did not try to produce a civic landmark that stands out against this fabric. They chose the most familiar form in the valley, the gable, and scaled it up just enough to hold a vehicle hall and an assembly room.

This is a sensible call. A fire station is one of the few public buildings a village sees every day. Making it look like a larger relative of the barn next door gives it authority without making it alien.

Vertical Timber and a Deep Canopy

The exterior is clad in vertical timber boards, and diagonal glulam brackets carry the roof well past the walls. That overhang does practical work. It shelters the yellow-framed folding glass doors of the front facade and gives the forecourt a covered edge where people can gather before an event or after an emergency call.

The yellow frames are the only strong color on the outside, and they are used with care. They mark operable things: doors, railings, openings. This is signal color in its literal sense, which suits a building whose main job is to open quickly.

The Threshold as Public Space

The entrance sits above a concrete base, reached by a stair with a yellow railing. Below the canopy, the struts frame views onto cobbled paving and the village street. Mosaic stonework and a yellow edge strip run between the timber members, which shows the ground plane received the same attention as the walls.

The forecourt matters because this building has to serve two very different crowds: crews moving fast and residents arriving for a club meeting. The paving, the canopy and the stepped entry let the two overlap without either one feeling squeezed out.

Engine Bays with a View

The vehicle hall is board-marked concrete, as you would expect, but it is not a dark garage. Tall glazed folding doors bring in strong light and stripes of shadow, and snow-capped peaks frame the parked fire engine. A control desk with microphones looks down into the hall through an internal window, so whoever coordinates a call can see the bay.

Glass walls also connect the concrete rooms to a small timber-lined meeting room. These internal views reinforce the main idea of the project: the brigade's work is visible, and it is not hidden behind blank walls. For a volunteer organization that depends on recruitment from the village, that visibility functions almost as a civic advertisement.

One Stair, Many Users

The central stair is the spine of the building and the place where its materials meet most clearly. Stone steps and yellow railings rise through a tall hall. Concrete walls on one side meet slatted fir screens on the other, and a library opens beyond. The pitched beam ceiling sits at the top.

Shared vertical circulation is a quiet but important decision. Firefighters, children heading to the library and dancers going up to the hall all use the same route. The building puts its mixed program into practice through daily movement, not through a diagram.

Kitchens and Counters for Volunteers

Volunteer brigades run on coffee and conversation as much as on equipment, and the break room acknowledges this. Yellow cabinetry, a freestanding island and a long window of afternoon light make it a place to stay, not just to pass through. Upstairs, a wood-panelled counter stands under wood-wool acoustic boards and a glulam beam, ready for events.

These spaces are modest, and that is the right register. They are built with the same honesty as the engine bays. Nothing is upgraded to impress, but nothing feels like an afterthought either.

Halls Under the Rafters

The upper hall is where the fir finally takes over. A sloped ceiling of exposed rafters covers an ash-floored room. Empty, it shows bands of sunlight. Full, it holds dancers in red vests turning across the floor. Elsewhere, a double-height room combines tall slatted windows with a large glazed opening aimed directly at a mountain, and children's tables sit below.

Here the roof form proves its worth. The gable that reads as vernacular from the street becomes, inside, a generous volume for gathering. The structure is left legible, so the room needs little ornament beyond its own construction and the landscape it frames.

Plans and Drawings

The drawings explain how the building fits so much into one footprint. It uses the slope to stack its program. The lowest level holds a large vehicle hall with a wash bay, changing room and technical spaces. The ground floor sets a foyer, library and volunteer room beside the vehicle bays. The upper floor is given to the main hall with its seating, lounge and washrooms. The attic holds club rooms and a roof terrace, linked by a bridge across the central stair void.

The section shows how the terrain does the sorting. Heavy uses sit in the hillside, and social uses rise into the timber roof. The elevations confirm how the volume behaves differently on each side. The east face has four large sliding timber doors. The west face has a ramp and braced eaves set against the church spire. The south face carries ribbon windows and lettering.

Why This Project Matters

Many rural municipalities in the Alps face the same arithmetic as Mötz: aging civic buildings, shrinking budgets and active voluntary organizations that need space. Imgang's answer is to stop treating the fire station and the community hall as separate commissions. One compact, klimaaktiv Gold building built on the site of a vacant predecessor is a stronger use of land, energy and public money than two scattered ones.

The broader lesson concerns restraint. Concrete, fir and ash, one gable, one stair and one signal color are enough to give a small village a building with real civic presence. We would like to see more rural competitions written with this kind of combined brief, and more architects willing to answer them this plainly.

Fire Station and Community Hall Mötz by Imgang Architekten (Christoph Milborn, Clemens Plank, Alexandra Schmid Roner), Mötz, Tyrol, Austria. Area: 1,778 m². Completed 2026. Photography by Günter Richard Wett.

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