The project lies in a zone of Munich that conveys only a few binding rules, only a few urban anchor points: the autobahn certainly, the old village centre too, and then the partly ambitious large structures, sitting somewhat self-centredly next to each other like ships in a harbour.
We therefore decided not to seek a large format as a response to the location but rather a structure, a kind of woven texture. This texture should be freely accessible in every direction and possess an inner airiness and lightness to give the low houses a close relationship to the earth and nature. For the shape of the texture, we wanted to find a form whose rapport creates an alternation between large and small courtyards, but also a rapport that primarily makes clear through its own shape that the space experienced is part of a very broad, large pattern that stretches across the entire site.
Starting from the existing cultural character of the site, the medieval farming technique of the ‘hochacker’ (the German equivalent of ridge and furrow) was adopted for the idea of the new landscape and further developed for the landscaping. The grounds will have an alternating modulation through which the rooms are structured. This modulation has its starting point in a rolling landscape on the autobahn side to hold back the noise. The structure of the buildings now lies on this moving surface like a loosely draped piece of cloth.
The central design issue of the project was to produce a balance between a consistent, uniform structure and the individuality of places, rooms, and houses. Basically, only a very few rules should keep the quarter together in the future: the external dimensions of the houses, the building heights, the access principle and the dramaturgy of public and semi-public courtyards with a continuous path system.
The layout of the buildings follows the weaving patterns and thus creates a large bandwidth of building depths. Although experience shows that this increases the design effort, it also freely creates the natural preconditions for a lively variance and diversification of dwelling types. As in the former Berlin housing development, the strict limitation to four storeys brings about a clear attempt to concentrate attention on the ground and free space with regard to the dwellings.
The different apartment types and the terraced single-family houses are practically distributed across the whole site to allow as few classifications as possible. In particular, the landscaping towards the autobahn should have such a wide range of topographical riches that no impression of an underprivileged situation should arise.