Description
The periphery of Berlin is particular village-like in its southwestern part where in the 1920s to 30s a number of housing estates for the bourgeois middle classes where built. Kleinmachnow survived the war and the subsequent communist period almost unscathed, and became a sought-after middle-class urban residential area after the Berlin Wall fell. Peter Herrle found a building plot for his own home here. He and Werner Stoll had to face the problem of interpreting the omnipresent, average and anonymous gable-roof type the building regulations required, and came up with an original solution.
Herrle split the volume up into a served and a servant building section. They are placed parallel with each other along the line of the plot as narrow, bar-like figures set close together, but the surprising feature is that they look like two quite different entities: one is a living section in pure timber construction, with its roof sloping very gently towards the street, and the other, behind it, is a service wing in exposed concrete with a flat roof. But it is immediately clear that this is not just a conversion plus an additional building: the parts unmistakably belong together because of the marked contrast between them. Proportions, detailing, material quality and spatial disposition join to give this tension-filled pair a sense of unity. ‘Hard’ and ‘soft’ are combined in a new way, with the homogeneity of the outer skin, stone in one case, tight wooden laths in the other, providing the key to this close partnership.
The architects leave a glazed gap between the buildings; it could be a spacer, but it is more like a communication space: a hall that forms a link and takes the stairs up to the top floor as a barrier, thus deliberately making it impossible to move right across here. The simple division of the spaces follows the reduced overall form. In the ‘wooden house’ the dominant living area consists of the ground floor with the terrace facing the garden and its old pine trees, and the bedroom floor above; and the ‘concrete house’ has the subordinate zones for each: kitchen and ancillary rooms on the ground floor, then the bathroom and cupboard space on the top floor. This pair of buildings, excitingly far apart and yet closely linked, perhaps uses this sectional disposition to reflect the occupants’ philosophy to the outside world.
Drawings
Photos
Exterior view of the double building from the south-east
Interior view of the living room with view to kitchen
Originally published in: Klaus-Peter Gast, Living Plans: New Concepts for Advanced Housing, Birkhäuser, 2005.