Austria's designer city of Graz emerges from Vienna's shadow

By Verena Wolff Aug 23, 2011, 3:06 GMT

Graz, Austria - Elisabeth Soos is a level-headed lady but she is afraid of one thing: Moths. For that reason she looks closely at any creepy-crawlies on the walls of her small shop in the Faerbergasse street in Austria's second-largest city of city of Graz.

Soos is a designer and moths are the natural enemy of the material she works with - traditional loden cloth made from carded yarns. The time-honoured material from Styria is used almost exclusively for traditional dress, something which Soos thinks is a bit of a shame: 'It is such a beautiful cloth and it can be used to make clothes to be worn the whole year round.'

She offers her loden jackets in lurid green, pink, orange, red and lilac. Items in more discreet colours can also be found hanging in her boutique. The designs are all produced in small numbers only and a typical loden garment in the series costs around 300 euros (426 dollars).

Soos is not the only young designer offering bright, new clothes in the rather dour alleyways of this city with its coveted World Cultural Heritage status. Her colleagues include an eclectic mixture of those selling jewellery and other fashion items, along with industrial designers and architects.

The creative generation has found an ideal set of conditions in the city of the river Mur. 'First of all we have four universities, not to mention the colleges and academies,' said historian Wolfgang Petermandl. The city's academic profile is reflected in the population of Graz, with 50,000 students among the city's 260,000 inhabitants.

Elisabeth Soos enjoys living here too. She spent a while living abroad but was keen to return to the city of her birth. 'I like it when you keep running in to people you know and I appreciate living in a genuine provincial city.'

Graz is still not on a par with Vienna but it is steadily emerging from the shadow of the Austrian capital, and boasts its own attractions. Graz has the largest and most traditional of Austria's department stores along with the Zeughaus, the world's largest existing original armoury with 32,000 weapons.

Graz has a cathedral, the opera and a theatre along with numerous parks, gardens and street markets, some of which are renowned for their gourmet specialities such as Styrian pumpkin seed oil.

Towering above all is the Schlossberg castle which is one of the city's best-known landmarks. A lift inside whisks visitors to the top. Tourists can also either take the funicular railway or scale a flight of 260 steps.

Graz is not an old-fashioned place but its skyline is far from ultra-modern either. The city is characterized by the old quarter with its twisting alleyways and myriad courtyards. Graz does however have some bold, modern buildings fashioned from concrete, glass and steel.

'The aim has always been to try and combine the contemporary with the status of the old quarter as an area of global cultural significance,' said Petermandl.

The city's visually radical art gallery on the riverside is one of those buildings which might seem out of place yet it still manages to blend in with its baroque surroundings.

The huge edifice of acrylic glass and steel by British creators Peter Cook and Colin Fournier looks best from above. It has been dubbed the 'Friendly Alien' by the architects themselves but some visitors liken it to a giant human donor organ. In any event, it contains a cafe which has proved to be a highly popular meeting place in the city.

Graz, which used to advertize itself as Austria's 'secret love', has become much more confident of its attributes, an attitude buoyed up by the European cultural heritage status accorded in 2003 along with the honour of carrying the 'City of Design' suffix.