Semi-detached house Heizenholz | XM Architekten GmbH

The new dwelling for two young families replaces an existing semi-detached house within a housing cooperative, built in the forties of the XXth century. The bisection and the hillside location with sea-view imminent to double-polarise the building: into the front and the rear and into “the mine” and “the yours”.

The project reacts to this primarily with a strong inner structure. Equivalent polygonal cells interlace into a kind of a honeycomb-pattern, repeating from the basement into all three main storeys. Only by omitting of singular walls the flowing spaces in the ground floor and the terraces in the attic result. The principal equivalence of the cells and their inner and outer relations is being pursued while at the same time each room maintains its own, precisely adjusted geometry. In this way the high spatial density should be generated within the limited volume. One comb in each house-unit is vertically punched and filled with a spiral stair - this high room provides to each part its spatial centre. Like two trees, standing next to each other, the singular rooms develop around this trunk and interlace, so in the plan in turns uncertain where one of the dwellings ends and the other begins.

The spatial twist appears in the outer form of the house as well. The confrontation of the honeycomb-structure of the building with the polygonal form of the plot - following the principle of the maximal utilization and building height - results in an arrangement of the volume by differently oriented, convoluted facade-segments. In this way the building adapt to the scale of its neighbourhood and above all - it appears as one coherent volume whose offsets define its surrounding spaces - the entrances, garden-terraces, etc. This impression of physical presence is being intensified by the rough trowel plaster surfaces of the cost-efficient insulated facades and the artisanal appearing hot-dip galvanised steel balustrades.