Description

Access:

Entrance hall with hobby room connects the street side and the courtyard side; external access corridor; interior stairwell; stairwells lit by windows.

Interior:

Like “stacked single-family homes,” the apartments are arranged on two floors as maisonettes and have their “own gardens,” translucent, straight stairways, floor plans that can be flexibly partitioned using sliding doors, and as few fixed walls as possible. On the entrance level of the apartments, there are open living spaces with kitchen niches, which open up to the elaborate outdoor spaces across their entire width.

Exterior space:

Loggias, as so-called vertical gardens, are a central aspect of the building concept. The one- and two-story loggias, which are more than 2 m deep, consist of a covered seating area, a lawn that receives rainwater, and a kind of floating loggia that provides views out of the living space and into an individual garden. Green roof gardens and an interior courtyard offer communal outdoor spaces.

Morphology:

The algorithm of the loggias and loges, each of which corresponds to an apartment, establishes the sculptural rhythm of the facade, which has a complex cladding of silvery corrugated sheet metal. Trellises for vines extend across the floors and, in season, provide greenery for the vertical gardens and create a buffer between the apartments and the street. The entire ground floor is left open for common use, and its facade consists mainly of windows.

 

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