House in Baden near Vienna
Next to the tracks of the Baden railway and behind a former factory owner's villa, the house occupies an introverted yet exposed plot between the tram line and the garden. Along the curve of the tram tracks, lined with tall, old trees, a private path tangentially opens up an almost square section of what was once the large garden of a factory owner's villa. The new house marks the end of this path with its front façade. On one side, the house is in close proximity to the tracks. On the other side, a wall encloses a garden and defines it as an autonomous space shielded from the outside world. This garden forms the conceptual counterpart to the transport infrastructure and can only be reached and perceived via the house.
The house appears to occupy a narrow plot between the railway tracks and the walls. Both dividing and connecting, the house mediates between the garden and the infrastructure. The house consists of a 55 cm thick outer wall made of insulating concrete. This archaic-looking construction is diffusion-open and has no layers. It is the same on the inside and outside. All interior walls and ceilings are made of 15 cm thin reinforced concrete. The pipes for heating in winter and cooling in summer are laid directly into the floor slabs without additional structures.
The entire house is a monolithic, thermally activated mass and has a temperature-regulating effect.
In a joint between the house and the wall, the garden wall folds into the building as a wall and defines the entrance. The interior space behind it extends over the entire half of the house facing away from the tracks. Behind the folded wall, it opens lengthwise to the garden. With its dimensions of more than 10 metres in height, almost 12 metres in length and just over 3 metres in width, it forms an empty half.
The garden space functions structurally and spatially as both an interior and exterior space. It is both part of the house and part of the garden. This large space forms the starting point for two staircases. One is centrally located, the other on the periphery. Twisted together like a double helix, they open up the second, full half of the house, in which six rooms on three floors face the railway tracks. Each of these rooms has the same floor space, a large fixed window facing north towards the tracks and a door for ventilation that faces away from the noise. The different lengths of the staircases generate different room heights for these otherwise identical rooms and provide subtle differentiation.
The connections and relationships between them qualify the quantitatively similar rooms. The two staircases provide access to two independent, unconnected parts. From the entrance area, the peripheral staircase leads to two rooms, offset by half a floor. The central staircase leads through one room to a room at the top of the house. Although all these rooms are located above and next to each other, they are perceived as being as far apart from each other as possible. Due to the intertwining of the staircases, both parts adjoin all four sides and extend over all four floors.
Despite the separation, the house is experienced as fragmentary, but always perceived as a whole. The specific spatial qualities create unpredictable and diverse possibilities for appropriating the neutral rooms, thus responding to living conditions that are already almost past or may never occur.
