Baumschlager Hutter Partners

In Vorarlberg´s extremely busy Rhine Valley, bulky industrial buildings and fragmented, small-scale residential buildings interweave into an open, yet placeless landscape. An atrium- house sits broadly and firmly right in the middle of it. The intimacy achieved therein is surprising. Carefully proportioned white wall surfaces, oiled oak parquet flooring throughout, and little furniture create a quiet framework. In the single-story atrium-house, living, working, and a spacious garage with storage surfaces are united into a barrier-free living environment. The rooms lead into a courtyard, open, but at the same time protected on all sides by walls. This center is surrounded on three sides by an ambulatory and a spacious living room all with ceiling-high glass walls. In the summer it becomes an additional room and in the winter a snow-covered garden. On the fourth side, a wooden wall can be slid to the side, revealing a covered terrace. Only there does one meet the neighborhood. Outwardly, the wooden structure appears very discreet. Only one room with an exterior entrance and the terrace allow visual contact with the world outside. The rest of the rooms are indirectly lit by flat skylight strips or slender, inset niches. However, the house does not appear closed, and therein lies another subtlety. It speaks the language of classic modernism with clear geometry and precisely executed recesses. Yet it is not smooth, and it avoids any aesthetic coldness by means of its formal liveliness and the choice of open wood boarding painted white on the exterior. In this lies a fresh and almost humorous interconnection of the nonchalance of building as practiced by the Vorarlberg architects in the 1980s and the internationality which Baumschlager Hutter Parnters demonstrate with international large-scale projects. ( Text: Robert Fabach, Bregenz, 12.4. 2012 )

Client
private

Architect
Baumschlager Hutter ZT GmbH, AT, Dornbirn

Photos
Marc Lins