Like a boulder, the crystalline monolith stands on a large ground, concrete inside and out. With walls and roofs made of infra-lightweight concrete, the insulating layer is dispensed with. The building is as it seems to be, concrete throughout.
The shape of the folded, polygonal roof is derived from the surrounding hipped-roof houses of the 1930s, and interacts with the Rombus shape recognizable in the floor plan. The garage is integrated into the roof landscape and joined together to form an overall sculpture, which is surrounded and permeated by equally amorphous cut, partly sunken surfaces in the outdoor space. The repetition of the rhombus, in the airspace of the gallery, in the herringbone parquet of the children's and office rooms, in the Spanish cement tiles in the hallway, dining and cooking, as well as in the formwork of the stairwell, forms a kind of echo of the basic design idea.
The house opens with its six sides in different directions: to the south and west, the living, to the east the dining and kitchen, to the north on the ground floor the au pair apartment, in the basement, to the east, pool, sauna, steam bath and fitness, the outdoor area of which is formed by a sloping atrium, which is connected to the garden via a staircase.
The rooms on the upper floor spiral upwards in a ring around the diamond-shaped staircase hall, and are divided into different functional areas: to the north on the upper floor the parents' rooms, a few steps higher the children's bathroom and children's room, and finally, at the end of the gallery, to the west, the offices, whose main access is via a separate staircase.
Just as the shape of the building was derived from the surrounding garden city houses, the materiality of the roof and walls developed from the uniformity of this material, which is the most authentic representation of the strongly geometric structure. The purity of the material is as captivating as it is sophisticated. Above all, the roof and plinth, confronted with rain, snow and sun, had to be covered with another layer despite the long development and research phase of this construction project (in cooperation with Heidelberg Zement and Prof. Dr. K.Ch. Thienel, Institute for Construction Materials, Bundeswehr University Munich). Kemperol now seals the house from above with interspersed quartz sand, the mixture of which was matched to the colour of the ultra-light concrete, and a cementitious slurry protects the base area.
In the interior, an equally clear material and shape concept determines the rooms, a composition of different shades of white and grey: concrete, natural stone, grey carpet, white cement tiles and old white painted surfaces are juxtaposed with the floors and fixtures made of oak and smoked oak. [...]
Source: Pool Leber Architekten
Photos: Brigida González
Isometrics: Erona Thaqi in the seminar FACADE 4.0 at TUK
The preparatory work for this project publication was carried out as part of the building construction theory in the seminar FACADE 4.0 at the TUK through a student thesis by Erona Thaqi.
