A building construction that is as economical as possible and at the same time sustainable is the focus of the design concept.
The continuous construction grid with an axial dimension of 3.85 m allows, on the one hand, high-quality room units with a high degree of modularity and repetition for the apartment floor plans. In addition, the vertical loads can be efficiently transferred down to the basement level without any offsets.
We conceive of the skeletal structure as a living shelf that can respond to very flexible requirements and be expanded according to different wishes. Participatory models for self-expansion are also possible.
The basement was deliberately kept compact in order to conserve resources and minimize the sealing of surfaces. The areas not built under as a result allow for densely planted courtyard greenery.
As part of the ensemble Thierschplatz – Forum Maximilianstraße – Mariannenplatz, the façade of the Stadthaus fits into the closed perimeter block development. Here, Lehel is characterised by monuments from the Neo-Renaissance period: Old buildings with generous storey heights divided into plinth, standard storey and roof according to the classical order. But some post-war buildings also complement the old complex pragmatically in typical colours. The design refers to the structure and plasticity of both neighbours. Large oriels push their way into the street space. They are not just façade decoration: the kitchens and dining rooms of the city flats interlock here with the outside and offer a wide view into the depths of Thierschstraße to the south.
Ideas workshop for the neighborhood development of the former spinning mill in Senden – Living between forest and water
The site of the former Senden spinning mill is located south of Ulm in the landscape of the Illertal. Here and there, quarry ponds and old canal arms also bear witness to the river’s importance as an industrial site. Today, largely renaturalized, this natural area offers great potential as a local recreation area. In Senden, it was the textile industry that made use of the water power here – with the spinning mills in Freudenegg and Ay and the weaving mill on the Illerkanal, the first large building structures settled here. We see our design rather in relation to the scale of the landscape and as a heritage of the large industrial building structures, not as a continuation of the outwardly proliferating settlement structures of Sendens/Ay.
The main driver of our design process was to free the building from the diverse challenges of the site. To grant him a self-evident right of his own, based on himself and the function.
Accordingly, our design takes up the formative element of the property, the curvature along the property line, and uses this to develop the building’s fish-belly structure. The curve on the street side wraps its fingers protectively around the rooms opening onto the courtyard and the old stock of trees. The sweeping curves keep the references of the individual rooms adjustable and thus form the basic structure of the design that is as simple as it is robust. It enables the protective and at the same time binding gesture to be further developed together in the further process and in this way to be able to absorb external and internal influences without jeopardizing the overall concept.
On the site of the BUGA 2019, the city of Heilbronn is developing the new Neckarbogen urban district, divided into different building plots. For this purpose, an investor selection process was launched, in which we participated for Wüstenrot together with colleagues and worked on up to two plots per architect. We worked on the plots L4 and L8. The first floor is to be used for retail or community purposes, while the upper floors are to be used for residential purposes.
The principle of joint development of an entire building site offers synergies to maintain the diversity desired by the awarding authority and at the same time to create the highest possible efficiency between the buildings.
Today, Neuperlach’s heterogeneous network of clods derives its spatial quality from the often unmediated juxtaposition of the most diverse structures and uses. Our contribution therefore aims at adding an independent, powerful and identity-forming structure to this mesh, which stands on an equal footing with its weighty neighbors. All the more intense spatial connections emerge at the level of the human scale. The design develops its identity from the structuring linear rows of trees of the existing parking lot structure. The relevant tree population is thus preserved and continues to order the area. It connects the new use with the history of the site.
The community of Neuried, southeast of Munich, wants a new town hall, residential and commercial buildings as well as a new town center for its citizens. Our design extends the existing historic Angerraum across Planegger Straße to the north. The individual buildings are loosely aligned with it and seek a relationship to the existing scale and building style. They contain the new square in a self-evident way and shield it from the large street intersection. In the second row and yet with great physical presence, the new city hall pushes into the square space from the west. A wooden jewel box that glows mysteriously in the evening and expands the public space inside during the day with its large, open atrium.
Office building, construction site GE3
The new building forms the conclusion and the joint at the eastern end of the iCampus. A generous public passageway into the existing green space links the pedestrian promenade running in an east/west direction to Ampfingstrasse with its specific building structures. In the building itself, this movement is announced by the indentation of the ground floor zone. This creates an open space of high quality between the new building and its surroundings. The volume of the building is scaled and individualized by subtractions from the maximum allowable figure. From the interplay of metal facade and trend-setting wood-hybrid construction, the self-evident quality character of the building develops.
Two buildings are added to the south side of the existing development from the 1970s to form a superblock. The characteristic scale and proportion of the location are taken up and continued through the volumetry of the buildings. The two recessed roof storeys are not superimposed onto the standard floors but are a component of both the existing building’s cubature and of the superblock.
The character and the special atmosphere of the historic ensemble of the Böllberg Mill can still be experienced today, despite serious damage. The design seeks to generate new structures from this strength. Existing structures are integrated where possible. Through new references of the components, the bodies of the warehouse, the villa as well as the utility buildings become newly readable in the context of the mill yard through proportion, materiality and detail. The old commercial buildings thus become individual residential buildings that stabilize the ensemble and form the back for the mill and mill square. In the open space, too, the existing layers are sensitively worked on and strengthened. The mill yard, garden and open staircase are essential components of the ensemble.
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Construction phase 1:
The first module of the development area is directly on Hansastrasse and in the first two buildings with a commercially used boarding house in Hansastrasse, income-based subsidised flats and two town houses and rented dwellings, already reflects important parts of the envisaged variety of uses for the entire area.
Out of the industrial and robust charm of the place and the necessity of conferring in particular on this first nucleus of urban intervention a homely ambience that lends identity, the individual parts spreading into the depths of the block are evenly developing their own individual character and their common bond. (more…)
The design inscribes the characteristic matrix of the urban planning concept with a floor plan fabric that incorporates the various requirements and develops them into a self-evident structure. Despite the complex building structure and the urban planning requirements, the design seeks to implement the EOF requirements systematically and as serially as possible. The structure of the 3-unit module can serve different apartment sizes through switch rooms at the interface of the apartments. In addition, the apartments are provided with a generous hallway space that can be read either as a tightly sized room of its own or as a dining hall. In this way, the apartments can designate an additional room despite the rigid EOF requirements.
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Study 2019 + Competition 2014
Within the urban design developed in 2014 by our office, Meili, Peter Architekten Munich, the design aims to combine today’s requirements for large-scale structures, efficient building depths and the variously restrictive requirements of subsidized housing with a building structure that is also varied in terms of urban space with quality outdoor spaces.
The design checks this basic structure with the specific requirements of GEWOFAG for efficiency and seriality as well as simplicity and attention to detail. The starting point of our design work is therefore a systematically developed, efficient 5-unit module. The essential steps and design decisions are presented as a modular design concept.
At the transition from Allach to Karlsfeld, the triangular site straddles the S-Bahn line to the east, Eversbuschstrasse to the west and Otto-Warburg-Strasse and the A99 to the south. The heterogeneous surroundings with single-family housing estates on one side and the large scale of the railroad embankment on the other give reason to provide the quarter with independent typological characteristics: Three large, space-enclosing building structures are pushed together to form an open courtyard-like figure. The wide parking space inside penetrates between the buildings to the outside and makes the interior of the settlement accessible to the public. The neighborhood interconnects with its surroundings through new open spaces.
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Today, the neighbourhood on Goethestraße shows that at the time it was not always immediately possible to balance the two ambitious guiding principles of park landscape and traffic. The wide street space of Goethestraße cuts through the park landscape and reduces the remaining green spaces of the settlement to pragmatic residual green between the buildings. Our contribution eliminates the street space of Goethestraße and connects the green spaces isolated on both sides to a continuous, diverse and eventful open space in the spirit of the originally intended park landscape. The new structures are composed into the landscape according to spatial considerations. They create an interplay of narrow and wide spaces.
The city of Stuttgart has a once-in-a-century opportunity to realign an entire city in the heart of Europe through the vacated railroad land. Ahead of us lies a groundbreaking task that we should tackle together with courage, determination and enthusiasm. Our work formulates theses on this:
Volkspark – local recreation for all.
The development of the city is of supra-regional importance, as is the investment in Stuttgart21. The Volkspark benefits all Stuttgart residents. A local recreation area in the heart of Stuttgart that respects the historic structures of the railway tracks and integrates cultural uses.
The history of the town of Stein and its special connection with Faber-Castell were the inspiration for the development of the new library. The striking gable roofs of the surrounding buildings are not imitated, but developed into an independent, distinctive form. The new building stands out and yet blends into the surrounding structure. The existing inner courtyard is extended and redefined by the new library. It forms the link between the local history museum and the library, as well as the exhibition rooms and event spaces. Together with the new building, the existing half-timbered ensemble forms the new cultural quarter.
General refurbishment and extension of Landshut Municipal Theater
The site is located on the banks of the Isar in front of the compact body of the old town. It develops from the “Bernlochner Stadtsälen” along the Isar towards the south. The shell of the base continues the proportions of the listed building as a softly curved curtain. Transparent and translucent, it envelops the main uses of the halls. They stand out on the outside and within the soft base, ordering and centering the flowing space of the foyer. For the public, starting from the Bernlochner Stadtsälen, a cultural landscape develops along the Isar, to which the diverse theater halls dock. It merges into the extensive park along the Isar, which provides the stage for the Landshut Wedding every four years.
Construction phase 2:
The second module of the development area is reached from Tübinger Strasse and completes the courtyard structure created in the first construction phase. The two building blocks develop from Tübinger Strasse into the depth of the site and contain the large town square. In accordance with the public character of the square, the ground floor is intended to contain important local supply shops as well as a childcare centre. The flats above are individually designed according to their respective situation in the building. Together with the buildings of the first construction phase, the two parts of this construction phase develop their own character and their shared identity equally. (more…)
In the historic city centre of Nuremberg, one can still feel a lively appreciation of the cultural heritage of the old town as well as the modern additions. The design for the new “Altstadt Karree” is anchored in the complex DNA of the place and allows the construction to sink back into the urban corpus without disclaiming its extent.
Hereto, the design continues the dense block structure between Breiter Gasse, Pfannenschmiedgasse and blends in with this structure through its materiality and roof form. The Zeughaus (arsenal) is freed again as the head building. To the south ofFrauengasse, modern linear structures characterise the modern image of the Kornmarkt and Hallplatz. The rhythm of the façades in particular towards the south, is generated from this light impression characterised by positive faith in the future.
With a narrow side facing Jungfernstieg, the area develops from the listed building, the “Hamburger Hof”, along Große Bleichen to Poststraße and comprises almost an entire block within the “Hamburg Old Town Ensemble”. In accordance with the original grain, we are developing individual houses which, in terms of structure, cubature, height development and design, each fit into the urban context independently and at the same time with great tranquility, respecting the inherent rights of the existing buildings. (more…)
Quartier A
The classic urban configuration of the two large blocks segregates from the public urban space two intimate, enclosed courtyards that open up to the north towards the factory district to form a common plaza. Hard shell, soft core – our design aims to support this very metropolitan configuration with a familiar principle and develops a modular building type that behaves accordingly differently inside and out.
The basic module, designed as a triplex, has its address on the street and has a through barrier-free access to the courtyard. The corner buildings join the block into a whole, creating identity beyond the quadrangle and clarifying the important over-corner relationships.
The ensemble around the Siemens high-rise building was originally planned and implemented by the architect Hans Maurer in the 1950s and is now to be converted into a new residential and work area following the conveyance of the site. The aim of our work was to work out a concept for the implementation of the intended residential usage into the existing tower block in such a way that the rules of the historic building fabric – both in the interior and in the external impression of the building – are respected and the building is reactivated as a vital component of the new residential area. (more…)
Using the example of the renovation of 1950s residential building in Ludwigshafen
The further development of existing post-war structures aims at making for coming generations precisely those districts interesting again that are near the city centre and endowed with a good infrastructure. The aim: Refurbishing such districts should help to prevent the drift away from the centre and the excess consumption of land on the edge of the city. Furthermore, the post-fundamental town needs increasing social diversity over and above the question of ecological and economic efficiency. (more…)
Winter and summer tourism have considerably transformed the alpine region in recent years and decades. Complex infrastructures characterise the landscapes and settlements. Instead of chamois, mountain goats and marmots, more and more people are clambering around through the formerly lonely and remote places. Accordingly, the forms of appropriation of the landscape for commercial use have changed. Likewise, the appearance of the villages has been transformed. (more…)
New Office Building and Showroom
The building is situated in Parkstadt Schwabing at the interface between residential and office buildings as well as a green belt. With its restrained elegance, it constitutes a central component of the quarter. Its appearance anchors it just as the different usages of publicly accessible showroom to the representative charisma of a headquarters.
The indented façade and the overhanging balcony elements of the upper storeys offer a protected and simultaneously inviting front zone and consciously seek references in classical modernism from Egon Eiermann to Mies van der Rohe. The warmth of the wooden windows and the cladding reflect the informal and simultaneously representative office atmosphere, also in direct day-to-day dealings. (more…)
New boarding house with shops and car park
The aim of the design is a dense building structure without isolated courtyards as well as front and rear sides. In order to achieve this, we have arranged three towers as a building group in such a way that the constellation can be interpreted as a whole, as a solid block but also as individual, filigree parts. The resulting plateau, “the in-between”, both separates and connects the individual buildings. It becomes a substantial part of the structure.
Analogue to the American megastructures of the Wilhelminian era, the rugged structure enables the optimal orientation of all apartments towards the outside and thereby generates the best possible lighting and ventilation. Despite the high building density appropriate to the location, there are unexpectedly wide vistas, both over the city and also into the countryside to the south right up to the mountains. (more…)
Our architecture is not explicit. It is not transparent, light, elusive or ephemeral. It is real, haptic and emotional. And it is precisely in the explicit, manual, tangible, genuine specification of the spatial that we see a possibility for the constitution of a concert hall as a highly specialised public space, as well as its complex social environment in industrial eastern Munich. Our contribution is therefore not a dazzling lighthouse: it is serious, a meeting place between high culture and subculture. A magic vessel, a house of shared music. Just like the Broadway theatres, the building falls into line with its industrial surroundings and opens up in its interior to a separate, magical world of music and encounter. (more…)
At the crossroads of Leopoldstrasse and Hohenzollernstrasse in the heart of Schwabing, the figure of a building emerges from the specific styles and eaves heights characterised in this sensitive area by Theodor Fischer’s construction plans.
The roof slopes steeply down to the prescribed eaves height of Leopoldstrasse, joins this in its development with the greater eaves height of Hohenzollernstrasse, clasps the building complex and integrates it in the street scene. The activation of the expressive roof shape and the support structure in the living rooms under the roof, together with the monolithic all structure and the intensive work on the plaster façade as a continuation of the broad Munich tradition, are further central topics of our work on this project. (more…)
Within the ambitious conversion project of the track areas located north of the railroad line in Regensburg, the project seeks architectural answers for different building types as well as an overarching architectural and spatial design idea within this neighborhood prelude.
The basic idea of the design guideline takes care of the transition from public to private spaces by marking essential building edges, but especially by precisely dealing with property and maintenance boundaries within the exterior space. In this environment, the individual building types (subsidized row construction, urban villas and townhouses) react in a differentiated manner to the most varied technical and urban spatial conditions as well as the peculiarities of the respective use.
Rifugio Petrarca
At this exposed location, the design develops from the confrontation with the avalanche protection requirements and a modern, efficient chalet structure. The area of the side wall grows sculpturally in its stone structure out of the mountainside and forms the physical avalanche protection. The folded roof transfers the movement of the mountain into the chalet and gives it an unmistakeable, concise identity. In the front part, the roof area leads seamlessly into the wooden construction. Both elements encircle the chalet corpus made of prefabricated wooden elements.
The building volume of the chalet on the valley side extends along the existing plinth of the former hut and can be clearly seen from a distance by approaching climbers despite the shape. Three large panorama windows on the ground floor offer a view down into the valley and across to the surrounding mountains. (more…)
The roar of traffic to the north, the natural landscape of the Isar meadows to the west, and a heterogeneous post-war building development to the south-east encircle the empty buildings of the former OSRAM administration on the site. To implement housing with an identity in these surroundings and produce the starting point for a high-quality district development to the south-east, our design aims to develop a robust, polyvalent building structure with a moderate height of 5 to 8 storeys. Our proposal: a Y-shaped basic structure of the new buildings as an efficient and space-creating construction form, standing freely in the park landscape. With its metamorphic adaptation of the discrete buildings, it enables a dialogue between the different margins of the area. (more…)
(Gleisharfe Neuaubing)
The project is integrated like a woven fabric in the clearing of the former railway sidings on Munich’s periphery. Like strips of fabric or thick threads, the buildings interlace the area and join up across the gaps between the buildings to form a textile pattern of flowing constructions. These structures enclose lens-shaped courtyards that give each building its own identity and particular location, and make it possible to feel the seclusion of the construction site and the contemplative peace of the industrial wasteland as a common basic theme. (more…)
Study 2019 + Competition 2014
Development of a residential quarter on Hanauer Strasse
In the heterogeneous area between Neuhausen and Moosach, which is characterised by the most varied usages and building types, the design takes its strength from a certain independent identity:
Large multi-unit buildings are placed together to form a courtyard-like but open space. This results in building lines and independent spaces that establish themselves within the different aspects of the district as a new, autonomous location and, in addition, make strategic contact with their environment. The interiors are “informal courtyards” that are accessed via large archways and gaps between buildings. They thus create a permeable, urban-like transition between the different surrounding functions.
The site is located at the interface between Maxvorstadt, with its characteristic block structure and the properties of Nymphenburger Strasse, which are primarily characterised by urban, representative aspects through open building with representative freestanding buildings and park-like green spaces. The design task is to bring the characteristic elements of the two structures into a positive dialog. Within the project, city and park merge excitingly with each other. (more…)
HOFSTATT + Section A + Section B + Section C + Section D + Section E + Section F/G + Passage
The Hofstatt project comprises the buildings on the former site of the Süddeutsche Zeitung in the centre of Munich. The whole task of the design is to attempt to create in this central location an urban form, a strong consolidation that at the same time respects the intrinsic rights of existing monuments as well as the mature building structure of the block as a whole. To this end, the individual building elements were individually developed according to their situation in the city framework and to their function, and designed as independent parts. In conformity with an old model of the City of Munich, the formally sealed-off square was opened up to the public by means of a public passageway. (more…)