Meister House
Published in DIVISARE BOOKS issue #107
A slight rotation of the upper floor in comparison to the two floors below articulates the building and brings it into scale with its surroundings.
This single-family house is located on a former cooperative workers’ estate and replaces a building designed in 1948 in the spirit of the garden city. Its close proximity to the airport meant that the municipal building regulations largely ceased to have effect. The resulting restriction to a slightly larger replacement building and the distance guidelines created a lengthwise rectangular plan and volume.
A slight rotation of the upper floor in comparison to the two floors below articulates the building and brings it into scale with its surroundings. This moment of phenomenological irritation is moved into the foreground while solutions to specific details are handled with discretion. A window grid is implied by slightly set back, niche-like surfaces. The use of fewer window types and a restrained formwork pattern allow the storey-high twisting to emerge as a distinctive motif of the façade.
Inside the building, the modest dimensions and the decision to eschew hallways create a sense of intimacy. In each room, the corporeal building envelope of insulating concrete is omnipresent. In contrast stands the separation of the external elements of the composition. The house, the showcase balcony of steel construction and the garage as a precast concrete element are spread loosely across the plot. These necessary functional elements create an immediate context within the surrounding greenery.
Materialisation in insulating concrete allows a systematic to be achieved in the solution of the necessary building details. The structural elements of the façade and the interior are all part of the cast shell. The formal severity inside and out is not an aesthetic end in itself. It aims rather to provide an economical use of moments of irritation and serves to channel the viewer’s attention.
