Description

Access:

Passageways connect street side to courtyard side; vertical point access, three or four units per floor; interior stairwell; external access gallery on the top floor (maisonette units); stairwells lit by windows or skylights.

Interior:

On the standard floors, each stairwell provides access to three or four different apartments that face one or two sides. These apartments are distinguished by a central hall living space with an open kitchen connected to it like a niche as well as an inset fully glazed loggia space, from which the individual rooms are accessed either directly or via an ancillary corridor. Some of the apartments on the two top floors are designed as maisonette units with an interior staircase and private roof terrace.

Exterior:

Glazed loggias, communal terraces on the top floor.

Morphology:

Urban-planning considerations prescribed a meandering volume, whose bulges alternate between the street side and the courtyard side. The facades are the same on the street and courtyard sides, subdivided into three horizontal bands: a continuous base, a subtly articulated five-story middle section, and a continuous penthouse band. This principle of vertical arrangement makes the building volume seem light and interwoven in one way and yet compact and succinct in other. The large and strictly articulated window openings recall commercial buildings and provide adequate light even for the apartments that open only to one side.

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