Description

The 7-story apartment building is a freestanding urban structure in the vicinity of a large roundabout. The sculptural appearance of the building is not only an end in itself: the cubature and the gabled roof profile emerged as a compromise in response to the requirements set by the development guidelines and a desire for maximum utilization and height. The windows, which appear to be randomly placed, flush with the homogeneous ceramic skin and wrapped around all four facades like a pictorial composition that seems to ignore the structure of the floors, are in fact essentially a reflection of the internal organization of the building.

The leitmotif for this project is stacked villas, each of which occupies an entire floor. Each villa has a unique floor plan: with openings that serve rooms with different dimensions and uses. The skeleton construction allows for a very free floor plan design, which connects open spatial sequences with a series of smaller and more private spaces – accessed through an array of various corridors and hallways, around which other rooms are bundled in turn. These conjunctions of spaces form a floor plan, in which not everything is immediately revealed. The spatial sequences are only deciphered through the movements of the users, successively and in fluid changes of direction.

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Originally published in: Oliver Heckmann, Friederike Schneider (eds.), Floor Plan Manual Housing, fourth revised and expanded edition, Birkhäuser, 2011.