brief description: social housing / private public partnership / technical upgrading / revitalization / conversion // space sharing aspects: new typologies / staircase, access balconies and garden as semipublic spaces / hybrid multifunctional spaces / switchable floor plan / multiincident shell
location: Bad Waltersdorf, Styria, Austria
client: Franz and Gertrude Brugner
architecture: SPLITTERWERK
project-team: Mark Blaschitz, Hannes Freiszmuth, Johann Grabner, Edith Hemmrich, Bernhard Kargl, Antje Neitsch, Gernot Ritter, Josef Roschitz, Andreas Stampfer
structural consultant: Wilhelm Lerch
energy consultant: Peter Kautsch
photos: Paul Ott, Nikolaos Zachariadis
video & video-stills: Markus Max Nagler, Mirac Caglar Yazici, Nikolaos Zachariadis
site area: 1.214 sqm
built-up area: 620 sqm
costs: 650.000 €
start of planning: 1998
start of construction: 2003
completion: 2004
construction: Bau-Pilz, Cserni Wohnen, Bscheider, Schlosserei Heco, Holz Bau Weiz
exhibition: in-aus-nach Salzburg, Austria and Sculptural Architecture in Austria, China
award: Geramb Dankzeichen für gutes Bauen 2004
Adaptation of an old farmyard, and a fire station
The building is situated in the center of the town of Bad Waltersdorf in the Styrian spa region. On site, the road expands to form a square which encompasses the building. A gallery accesses the apartments and creates an open space in front of every door. A garden adds to the apartments situated to the south-west of the plot.
Black Treefrog Succeeds Red
The existing building substance has remained nearly untouched. It is supplemented by a new outer envelope of wooden slats waterproofed in black, to serve as a trellis for wild wine, and by new inner shells of wood materials painted in different colors, which encompass the individual units. Form emerges largely unaffected by function: black, soft and translucent on the outside – colorful, hard and mirror-smooth on the inside.
The black wooden trellis changes the former heterogeneous patchwork of different parts of the building into a homogeneous shape. It provides shadow and screens from view. A wild vine is overgrowing the trellis and completes the impression of an arbour in some spaces. The changing colour of the wild vine will turn the colour of the Black Treefrog into green and red depending on the seasons.
Detached from the existing walls, the functional areas such as kitchen, sleeping, bathing alcoves or work spaces are integrated into the space between the inner and outer envelopes. This creates an neutral center – the Multiincident Shell – to which the functions of residential living can be sequentially or simultaneously switched.
The functionally neutral zones of the Multiincident Shells are painted in different colors depending on orientation and situation within the building, and are therefore responsive to the specific daylight conditions and floor plan configurations. The southern apartments are designed in cool gray and pure white, the northern apartments in warm ivory tones. The central apartments, with less natural lighting, are painted in vibrant red and blue, or sunny combinations of orange and yellow. Artificial lighting for all apartments is ensured by indirect lighting system in the functional areas, which takes the respective color schemes to these areas by means of reflection.
The surface of the main stairway of the Black Treefrog artificates the local grapevines, which additionally to the wooden trellis is informing the whole outside of the building as a landscape. The floors, walls, ceilings and steps of the staircase are treated as similar formal elements and are informed with a dense patterning of differently sized and detailed vine leaves. The informed surfaces influence the three-dimensional effect of the whole: the stair construction is seen less as a form in space and more as a programmatic division of entry, splitting access into two zones, one for the ground floor, and the other for the first storey. The missing risers of the open stairs allow an optical connection between these physically and functionally divided zones, and the surface patterns blur the distinction between foreground and background. The constructive and functional parts of the main stair are overlaid with the informed surface – the pattern of grape leaves. Simultaneously, the pattern breaks the construction’s lines and edges to the point that the geometry of the ensemble begins to dissolve. The space is transformed into a sphere.
VerfasserIn: Ina Westheiden // Bilder & Text: SPLITTERWERK
