Description

Building a detached house within a high-density inner-city development near high-rise housing usually presents architects with a special challenge. Here in Munich the urban development requirement was to fit the building in with an estate-like series of similarly dimensioned homes. The new building was also to be divided into a residential section with a smaller one beside it, usually to provide a garage. Andreas Meck and Stephan Koeppel solved the problem consummately by not accepting the simple, essentially random categorization of these sections, but by tying both parts together to an integrated figure. The house with its distanced carport thus forms a design unit, achieved by the use of a long connecting wall built into the body of the building, and also by choosing homogeneous material for the outer skin in the form of timber cladding. The cubic shape of the building and the ‘notch’ taken out of it, in other words the powerful incision made into the structural mass, support this intention. This creates an inner courtyard, surrounded by the protecting wall-screen of the outer skin, which prevents the plot from being overlooked, defines the outline of the building and shows off the intense colours inside the building. On the ground floor it offers the accesses from north and south, an office/guest room and the living room with kitchen and dining area, facing both the courtyard and the garden. There are three bedrooms upstairs, protected from prying eyes by the two-storey screen wall on the south side. The courtyard develops into an interesting specific place in the building disposition, creating identity and at the same time representing inside and outside, intimacy and openness. This shaded and ventilated area is particularly inviting to the occupants in the summer; here they have a core space available with the wall configuration of the house spiralling into it.

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