Hanover, Melbourne and Baltimore: extravagantly designed bus stops can be found in many cities worldwide. But in the countryside? And then also away from the high tourism areas? Will anyone even see that? Will they ever! “The interest in our bus shelters designed by international architects is unchanged, even five years after being erected,” reports Egmont Schwärzler, mayor of the Austrian community of Krumbach. “To this day, hundreds of visitors come every day from all over the world.” These include individual travellers arriving by car just as much as coach groups from Europe, Asia and America.

What is more, the small community of Krumbach, in Vorarlberg not far from Bregenz in the far west of Austria, hardly benefited from tourism up until a few years ago. “We are too far away from the big ski and hiking areas and there are only a few guest rooms here,” Mayor Schwärzler observes. That was intended to change with an unusual art project in the public sector. “At first it was just an idea conceived in the pub late at night,” explains Egmont Schwärzler, “but then a few committed people in the Krumbach culture club pursued the idea.” Seven international architects from Russia, Norway, Spain, Belgium, Chile, Japan and China were invited to design bus shelters for Krumbach. The executing building firms, regional architects and structural engineers then implemented the designs free of charge.

The result is seven bus shelters, which interpret the subject “Waiting for a bus” in different ways, mostly using materials from the region and taking local factors into account – here as an acute-angled alpine roof, there as a cosy “Vorarlberg lodge”, as a viewpoint focused on the mountains or as a multifunctional structure with adjoining spectators’ stand for the local football pitch.

“The bus shelters not only decorate the landscape, they also fulfil their purpose,” emphasises Gerhard Felder, a bus operator from neighbouring Mellau and co-founder of Bregenzerwald Bus GmbH, which carries out 40 per cent of all scheduled bus services in the region. “In Krumbach and in the entire Bregenz Forest, many people take the bus and do so to all the outlying districts. There is probably no country region in Europe that has such a well-developed public transport system as the Bregenz Forest. Our buses run to all 24 of our communities every hour, most of them even every half hour.”

The well-developed bus system was presumably also one of the reasons why those who came up with the idea selected bus shelters of all things for their project. Because until then there were not fixed shelters for the passengers at all bus stops.

The people of Krumbach are proud of their bus stop project, as Mayor Schwärzler knows. “Krumbach is now known everywhere as the village with the bus shelters.” A role model for other communities? “That is difficult to judge,” says Egmont Schwärzler. “Every community is different. But the project certainly paid off for us.”