Description
This home in a tight village context tries to adapt to the scale of adjacent parcelled plots with anonymous residential and functional buildings on them. The difficulty was to do justice to the heterogeneously developed village structure without abandoning the house’s own self-confident architectural expressiveness. Robert Beyer solves this problem effortlessly by splitting up the necessary building mass but still forming a design unit with a language of its own. A polygonal, angled plot and an existing neighbouring building coming right up to the plot boundary made it sensible to continue the building line by the street, in order to respond with a sense of village space and keep the garden area open to the southeast.
The building is clearly structured in three parts: a main house, devoted to the living function, that extends far into the garden as a block, an adjacent building as a granny flat that keeps the necessary distance from the boundary and yet ‘lives out’ into the garden undisturbed, and a garage section that not only takes up and continues the building line but approximates to the local gable roof form with a diagonal roof on the street side. Despite a parcelling shift in the street line and different paintwork for the three sections of the building, the figure does not disintegrate, as the same building height was chosen, and also the same façade language within an overall cubic body. Beyer even manages to bring off the balancing act between integration that is true to scale and a consistently contemporary approach to form. Here ‘living’ means being together in a neighbourly fashion on a cramped parcel with the generous shared green space of a detached house. The trinity remains a unity for this reason as well.
Drawings
Originally published in: Klaus-Peter Gast, Living Plans: New Concepts for Advanced Housing, Birkhäuser, 2005.