Crystal Talk
Text: Oliver HerwigPhotos: Florian Holzherr

PROJECTS

Arbeiten Allmann Sattler Wappner

Welcome to the e-home
The present-day house celebrates a nomadic way of living

On the outskirts of the Riem district of Munich. Metal gleams behind the hedges. A prototype: the present-day house. Where others have just one entrance this has three, where there should be a patio three platforms, each measuring 40 square meters, face south, east and north, and where most families live under one roof this one has four, no less. The house consists of four separate boxes, three of them at ground level, with a hovering communal platform above. Our first impression is one of ambivalence towards the steel facades, enormous windows and sharp edges, all surrounded by a grove of beech trees like in a Baroque garden. This green ‘curtain’ conceals bathrooms and bedrooms, and only the communal box with its square windows is above hedge-height. Alternating intimacy and the extroverted. That is the key to this project.

The house, a wooden pillar-style of construction is an e-home that combines electronics and living. Its flexible envelope adapts to accommodate any wishes. There is only one thing wrong with it: there is nobody living in it. It is operated by HDG (Haus der Gegenwart) GmbH, a non-profit-making company, behind which Bayerischer Hausbau, Fördergesellschaft Landespflege Bayern e.V. and Magazin Verlagsgesellschaft Süddeutsche Zeitung mbH stand. Right now the "World Champions - Design Germany" exhibition is being staged (through September 15, 2006).

















 

The door opens wide...!
The Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Munich

The Neuhausen district of Munich, near Rotkreuzplatz: An unspectacular, staid area full of older buildings. It is a nice place to live. Yet all of a sudden Lachnerstrasse recedes and opens out into a square. And here it stands, God’s container: an all-glass crate featuring the most straightforward geometry and the most intricate lighting. The building was the stage for Allmann Sattler Wappner’s big break-through. Conceived as a classic, conservative church it is cutting-edge in terms of material and construction.
Two gigantic, 14 meter-high doors, which are almost as high as the building, are opened hydraulically and hover over the forecourt, affording a view of the loggia-like front of the church. The actual wooden lamella nave – with gaps on all sides, enabling a sort of way of the Cross around the interior – is located within the glass envelope. The closer one gets to the altar, the bigger and more opaque the glazing becomes. In this case glass is not reinterpreted as the wrong metaphor for transparency, but rather forcefully concentrated into a defining element.














 

Heavy Metal
The Südwestmetall building: between mimicry and revolution

Reutlingen. At the heart of Swabia Modernism has been turned upside down. Thousands of floral metal sheets wind their way round three metal buildings with a sound saddle roof, the Südwestmetall Head Office. Allmann Sattler Wappner had leaves and stems cut into the square sheet metal and scattered then over the forecourt. It is a confusing view: Flora supporting perfect carcasses, steel monoliths, which scroll a single material from the base to the ridge, as if they were still part of a computer program. “Only tolerable in the shabbiest of workmanship “, was how Adolf Loos referred to the décor, but truly unaesthetic if the best materials and the greatest of care are used. And that was precisely the point of the exercise. Ornamental trellis work flanks the building’s load-bearing structure, but with a twinkle in the eye. A revolt against banal building regulations. Five millimeters of steel separate the standalone from the buildings nestling in the surroundings. And make a statement on urban planning that is not out for surfaces and effect, but self-mockingly says: City and conventions - it depends on what you make of them.