Description

Access:

Entrance connects street side and courtyard side; vertical point access, two units per floor; interior stairwell; stairwell lit by skylight.

Interior:

Each of the apartments consists of one open-plan room and a service zone, which together extend the full depth of the building. The partitioning element that separates the service zone from the living area is called the “gill wall.” It consists of full-height wood panels which both slide and rotate, making it possible to adapt the service functions to the living room in various ways. The estrades that give the building its name are 40 cm tall and 1.8 m deep pedestals that extend continuously across the front and back of the building. This special spatial stratum makes various scenarios of use possible in this transition zone between inside and outside.

Exterior:

Balconies across the entire width of the apartment on both the street side and the courtyard side; roof terraces; common courtyard space.

Morphology:

The street side and the courtyard side are almost identical with their bands of windows, which are nearly the full height of the floor, and their broad, translucent but not see-through metal textile bands of balconies standing out from the surrounding late-nineteenth-century buildings. Especially when the full-height French doors, which can be rotated 180°, are open, so that the estrade and balcony together form a spacious loggia, the spatial concept of a stepwise, differentiated transition from inside to outside contributes uncompromisingly to the design.

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