Description
Although it is in sight of the nearby village, this ensemble of three solitaire buildings still looks like a self-sufficient, independent group of buildings on a connecting plateau. The planning task comprised houses for two brothers and their families, a joint office building and an exhibition hall for their private car collection. The exhibition hall was built into a pedestal, thrust into the slightly sloping terrain and continuing as platform for the houses. With the three-storey office building that ‘docks on’ to the plateau, this creates a courtyard situation as the central access area for all the buildings. Hence a situation almost like a village square is created, despite the solitaire placing of the ensemble.
Bernhard makes sure that the different functions are also expressed in their material building quality: the office block is conceived as a skeleton construction with a completely hung glass façade, while the dwellings are masonry wall constructions with large dissolved areas facing out over the wide expanse of countryside. Despite the contrasting materials–white rendered surfaces with dark apertures alongside colourfully printed glass walls–the buildings with their prismatic cubature still form a design entity. The two similar dwellings, with the same formal vocabulary, the same proportions and the same spatial orientation, share the classical distribution of functions: main entrance and an area for living, cooking and dining on the ground floor, with upstairs bedrooms. Air spaces link the levels vertically, creating a changing, shifting one- and two-storey spatial structure, thus building a contradictory tension within firmly defined block-like outlines. Thus the airy internal spaces spread out via the dissolved corners into nature and on to the horizon.
Drawings
Originally published in: Klaus-Peter Gast, Living Plans: New Concepts for Advanced Housing, Birkhäuser, 2005.