Description

Access:

Entrance hall on street side; vertical point access, one unit per floor; interior stairwell; stairwell lit by windows.

Interior:

All four flats stretch across both the new and the old building and have features of a classic, upper-middle-class apartment. Only the two-story penthouse apartment is located entirely within the new volume. The old building, with its small-scale cellular structure, houses private spaces for retreat, such as the bedrooms and bathrooms. The new building permitted greater spans and taller spaces; the transition is different in each apartment, since the jump in levels increases toward the top. The new building houses the entrance hall and the stairwell as well as the living rooms with dining areas and kitchen niches with fluid transitions.

Exterior space:

Terraces and balconies in different forms, depending on the orientation and the urban-planning situation; private garden on ground floor.

Morphology:

The building is a synthesis of an old building and a new one, which are slightly staggered, for reasons relating to the building code. The new building is a six-story cubic volume with a shell of slightly corrugated ceramic panels with black glaze. The bay windows, terraces, and balconies lend the building its plasticity, which the designs of the corners of the front building emphasize within a town planning perspective. The bright frames and coverings of the banisters articulate the facade but also establish a formal relationship to the traditional adjoining buildings with their stone window frames and horizontal bands.

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