brief description: prototype / social housing / mobile / temporary / convertible building / prefabricated / modular / wood panel / do-it-yourself construction // space sharing aspects: floor plan typology, urban design
location: Übelbach, Styria, Austria
client: Graz University of Technology
architecture: SPLITTERWERK
project-team: Mark Blaschitz, Johann Grabner, Edith Hemmrich, Bernhard Kargl, Gernot Ritter, Josef Roschitz, Peter Schreibmayer, Markus Zechner
structural consultant: Wolfgang Heusgen
energy consultant: Peter Kautsch
photos: Peter Eder
built-up area: 140 sqm
costs: 700 €/sqm
start of planning: 3/1993
start of construction: 5/1994
completion: 6/1994
award: Holzbaupreis 1998
Übelbach, southern training center. Somewhere on the gigantic parking lot, there is a house, a piece of architecture, das Wohnstück – the residential piece. Seemingly immobile and yet as if it had just landed. Who, after all, would build a house in a parking lot? It will probably have to go. So it is light, can be disassembled, reused. Not a piece of real estate, but an intelligent product. Made from prefabricated parts, subject to modular principles, it has replaced craft tradition by the idea of industrial production. It is prefabricated, was assembled at high speed, and is cheap.
The Director’s Cut of Living
The Wohnstück, narrow and slender, reinterprets residential living as a process of adaptation and change, does away with orientation, turns rooms into functional areas and corridors into habitable rooms. It is a return to simplicity, a clear design statement. Nothing is disproportionately large, each detail has the value it deserves. It does without demonstrative signaling and provocation to the benefit of innovative solutions for everyday problems. (Peter Schreibmayer, 1994)
VerfasserIn: Ina Westheiden // Bilder & Text: Sammlung SPLITTERWERK
