Description

Access:

Courtyard accessed via space between buildings and the central gap on the ground floor of the building; vertical point access, four and five units per floor; interior stairwell; stairwells lit by glass-brick wall.

Interior:

The concept of a central all-purpose room, around which the individual rooms and kitchens are grouped, pays homage to Alvar Aalto’s apartment building for Interbau in Berlin in 1957. Adjacent to this all-purpose room is a relatively spacious loggia, which can be accessed from the dining or living rooms and sometimes from one of the individual rooms. It reveals, at least in the larger apartments, a complex network of paths, all of which touch the expanded central living room. The bathrooms and toilets are located in areas of this deep building volume that do not receive natural light or ventilation.

Exterior:

Loggias adjacent to living room, with special variant for the corners; terraces on ground floor; communal plazas.

Morphology:

The plasticity of the plastered volume reflects the building’s inner structure. The projecting band of windows on the main facades results in a clear demarcation of the individual apartments, which extend the full width of the building or are arranged at right angles. Each unit can be read as a kind of building within the building, without permitting residents any further personalization that would be visible from the outside. Staggering back the facade and dispensing with corner posts on the windows at the corner give the units distinctly more open prospects. In contrast to the horizontality of the openings, the band of glass bricks that strives upward from the entrance to the building marks the naturally lit access route inside.

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Originally published in: Peter Ebner, Eva Herrmann, Roman Höllbacher, Markus Kuntscher, Ulrike Wietzorrek, Typology +: Innovative Residential Architecture, Birkhäuser, 2009.