Description

The architects heighten the formal language of the industrial estate for this house on a parcelled housing estate. A smooth, unarticulated cube, a homogeneous outer skin and few apertures do not necessarily signal a home, but a second glance reveals the careful façade detailing and the windows veiled by glass panels. Postel aestheticizes the ‘container’ most elegantly, but leaves it with its unwieldy structure and appearance. The ground plans follow the clear, unambiguous scheme of a constructive grid structure with light partitions: on the ground floor, the main access area with a corridor to the rear area divides the functions of a living room with kitchen on one side from a garage with ancillary rooms on the other.

The bedroom area on the top floor consists of a simple additive arrangement of bedrooms along a linear corridor. A transparent loggia provides a terrace space facing the garden. Here Postel is very consistently following his aesthetic of simplicity right through into the construction. The narrow sides and the back have timber cladding and ‘continuous strip’ windows, also a striking industrial building motif. The building is dressed to break this clarity only on the main façade, the access side. This is achieved through a feature that is scarcely discernible during the day: the regular windows are hidden behind glass panels printed with a fine pattern of dots. Diffuse transparency thus creates an aura of mystery, contradicting the otherwise prevalent theme of clarity as a motif that considerably enriches this architecture.

---

Originally published in: Klaus-Peter Gast, Living Plans: New Concepts for Advanced Housing, Birkhäuser, 2005.