MANZ Beletage Reframes a Loosian Address for Contemporary Exchange

In Vienna, Podrecca Architects adapt the upper floors above the historic Manz bookstore into a flexible cultural and professional interior.

Headquarters "MANZ Bel Étage" / Podrecca Architects — Image: Miran Kambič. Source: ArchDaily.

MANZ Beletage, a 2024 project by Boris Podrecca with Ivan Akerman, adapts the existing premises above the Manz bookstore at Kohlmarkt 16 in Vienna’s first district. The intervention gives a new public and professional role to a historically layered address, combining communication, presentation and media facilities with spaces for authors, customers and events. The project is presented by ArchDaily and documented in greater architectural detail by Podrecca Architects.

The careful description matters. The renovated premises are associated with Manz, a specialist publisher known for legal, tax and business publications, but the available evidence does not clearly establish them as the company’s headquarters. Nor should the entire renovation be described as an Adolf Loos interior. The strongest historical claim is more precise: Loos designed the Manz bookstore portal and related upper-floor rooms in 1912, elements that form part of the project’s architectural inheritance.

A new layer above the bookshop

MANZ’s identity has long been tied to the production and circulation of specialist knowledge. Its publications serve professional fields in which authority, clarity and reliable access are essential. The Beletage extends that mission beyond the printed volume. Instead of treating the upper floors as a static corporate fit-out, the project establishes a setting for exchange: a place where publishing can be presented, discussed and experienced collectively.

According to the architects, the Beletage accommodates communication, presentation and media functions, while supporting use by authors, customers and event participants. This program suggests an interior calibrated for changing degrees of concentration and visibility. A meeting can become a presentation; a presentation can become a public conversation; a professional appointment can unfold within a setting that also carries cultural memory.

That flexibility is particularly significant in a specialist publishing context. The contemporary publisher is no longer defined only by shelves, desks and storage. Its work increasingly includes events, digital communication, editorial encounters and the creation of communities around knowledge. The Beletage gives those activities a spatial address without abandoning the seriousness associated with Manz’s professional field.

Reading the Loosian legacy accurately

The historical reference point is the Manz portal and associated rooms designed by Adolf Loos in 1912. The portal belongs to the architectural history of Vienna’s first district and is documented by the Architekturzentrum Wien. Its importance lies not simply in authorship, but in the way Loos connected commercial identity with architectural expression.

Loos’s work for Manz belongs to a period when the storefront was becoming an increasingly powerful urban instrument. A publisher’s entrance had to announce precision and permanence while addressing the street with unusual directness. The portal therefore operates as more than a surviving decorative fragment. It is a threshold between the city and the institution, between the immediacy of commerce and the slower authority of accumulated knowledge.

Podrecca’s intervention gains strength by working within that layered condition rather than reducing it to a historical image. The project’s challenge is not to reproduce Loos, nor to turn the surviving rooms into a museum-like backdrop. It is to allow a contemporary program to occupy an inherited structure while keeping the distinction between historical fabric and new architectural work legible.

From retail address to civic interior

The Beletage also reflects a broader transformation in how central-city premises are used. A bookstore can remain an important public sign while its upper levels support a wider range of institutional and cultural activity. A report by Extrajournal described the Manz site as opening the Beletage to events after the closure of the bookshop, underlining the shift from a conventional retail model toward a more adaptable public-facing space.

This does not make the project less commercial. On the contrary, it shows how commercial identity can be sustained through experience, access and participation. In a central location such as Kohlmarkt, where architectural history and contemporary urban life meet at close range, the value of a premises increasingly depends on its ability to host different kinds of attention.

The Beletage’s significance is therefore spatial as much as symbolic. Its rooms can support the concentrated encounter of a client consultation, the collective focus of a panel discussion or the more informal circulation of an event. Such uses demand an architecture that is neither overdetermined nor neutral. It must provide enough character to represent the institution, while remaining open enough for changing content.

Architecture as editorial infrastructure

Seen in this light, MANZ Beletage is an example of architecture functioning as editorial infrastructure. Publishing organizes information through selection, ordering and framing. Architecture performs a comparable task in space: it determines how people enter, pause, gather, listen and move between public and private conditions.

The project’s most compelling idea is its negotiation between permanence and adaptability. The Loosian elements establish continuity with the building’s earlier life, while the new program acknowledges that contemporary professional culture depends on movement between physical and mediated forms of communication. The resulting interior is not valuable because it preserves the past unchanged. It is valuable because it makes the past available to a different pattern of use.

For Vienna, this approach offers a productive model for historic interiors. Preservation need not mean isolation, and contemporary intervention need not mean erasure. When the historical evidence is identified precisely and the new work is allowed to operate on its own terms, a building can remain culturally specific without becoming frozen.

MANZ Beletage ultimately presents the upper floors above Kohlmarkt as an active layer of the city: informed by Loos, shaped by Podrecca and directed toward encounters that publishing now needs to make possible. Its achievement lies in treating history not as a finished image, but as a framework for continued use.