Description

Access:

Entrance hall on second floor; interior corridor and stairwell; no natural lighting in stairwells and interior courtyards.

Interior space:

The individual apartments, intended to appeal to a target audience of young couples and families, are oriented in one direction, either east or west. The living spaces and individual rooms are accessed via a corridor, at the ends of which are kitchens and bathrooms that receive neither natural light nor natural ventilation. Every apartment has a generous space outdoors, designed differently according to the orientation and situation. In extreme case, this outdoor space is an autonomous gallery set off from the building.

Exterior space:

Mixture of different qualities: balconies; loggias as “green rooms,” some of which are set off from the building and accessed via footbridges; roof terraces.

Morphology:

The long sides of these slightly bent slab volumes face, on the one hand, the bank of the Lez River; on the other hand, they are surrounded by a grove of plantain trees. The staggered volume rests on a base of solid, rough stone blocks, which house parking places. The green facade, most of which is perforated by small opening, is constructed of concrete slabs: sedum grows in between the chunks of stone embedded in concrete. Another distinctive feature of the design is the layer of wooden boxes of different external spaces, which heightens and brings to a point the intended dialogue of the “natural” and the “artificial.”

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