Patrick Reuter Architecture

The new Sonnenbad is a place for recreation and social interaction, and includes a variety of different all-year-round services. Its centerpiece is a natural swimming pool, located in the middle of a vast garden area with a valuable population of trees. The circular pool includes a swimmer and non-swimmer area and a surrounding pond for biological water filtration and treatment. The pool is complemented by open and covered recreation areas, changing rooms, a restaurant and a kiosk, an event hall and a youth center, a sauna with a relaxation zone, and a small maintenance area. The existing buildings date back to the early 20^th century and were built at a time when public and group hygiene and health awareness became important. The latter are now at the end of their life cycle, hence replaced and complemented by a modular wooden structure. The linear historical layout and its enclosed outdoor areas are incorporated and further developed. The architecture is reduced to a structure that may serve as the origin for multifaceted and diverse places, moods and associations. The structure can be sometimes stronger or sometimes weaker and should be able to adapt to the needs and the times. This new place is characterized by interplay between framing and permeability, between closeness and expansion, eventually between fragility and resilience.

The pavilion lies at the base of a protective earthen wall that grows up out of the park landscape and holds the spatial concept in the center of which it defines a freely playable inner courtyard. Only this explosive expression of the great urban dynamism allows the space to reveal its versatility and playability. The simple transformation of the topography becomes the architecture. Fully embedded in the terrain, the pavilion is an integral part of the park. The round hill embodies constancy and continuity. Seasonally, the inner courtyard is given a light roof, a breathing social body. There it is heaviness and permanence, here it is lightness and inconstancy. In this way, the enclosed circular courtyard is expanded by the idea of a year-round playable courtyard. Almost invisible during the day, it exposes soft lantern light at night. The earth wall is opened towards the city with a puncture and fanned out towards the park in such a way that the green space is invited into the courtyard and, through its stepped form, serves as an inviting seat on the park shell.

The new building will be extended around a new main body, which naturally seems to hover over the existing building. Between the new and the existing structures, the greenhouse, which stands for innovation and sustainability, will be introduced as median layer. The interpolated mezzanine is visually drawn back, whereas the structure of the upper floor displays an accentuated exteriorized design. The upper floor assimilates the structure of the existing building, supporting itself on it. The concept is clearly legible and comprehensible, representing transparency and candor. Air pollution and smog are a severe problem in Singapore. Singapore is committed to the urbanistic purpose of connecting the natural, tropical environment with the tree population, for which reason the cityscape is dominated by street trees, greenspaces, parks and façade greenery. The blueprints for the swiss chancellery aim to reflect this actual climate change policy and achieve a technical, architectural and innovative building. The greenhouse is the lungs of the building, stretching between the new and old sections of the structure, and ensures a natural air purification process through interior greenery. The air will be filtered through the greenhouse, which virtually serves as an oxygen reserve, and the plants spread the purified oxygen with greatly reduced levels of carbon dioxide through the ventilation systems in each area of the house. The severely polluted air will naturally be cleansed.

The horizontal building structure is thoughtfully embedded into the contours of the hillside; the transition from the interior to the exterior is seamless and fluid. The narrow retaining walls bordering the residence and the enveloping yard give shape to a courtyard setting and preserve the palpable feel of the sloping terrain. A set of steps delineates the spatial flow of the interiors from entryway to the living, dining, and kitchen areas, picking up on the character of the descending outdoor terrain. The floor, fireplace, and two exterior load-bearing shear walls are made of concrete. A homogeneous structure, seemingly cast in one piece, encases the living room and serves as the foundation to the overlying wood construction. A solid wood construction consisting of four exterior sheer walls and two transverse walls forms the structure of the overlying story, where the bedrooms are located. The wood construction is left exposed to the interior, while glass and metal surfaces form a weather barrier on the exterior. The wood structure rests on two vertical concrete shear walls, cantilevering to the front and back. It is stabilized by way of cross-bracing steel tension bars on the east- and west-facing windows that hold the two wooden shear walls together. The ceiling on the ground floor is hung front to back by way of tension rods attached to the two transverse steel roof beams. The concrete construction on the ground level and the wood construction on the upper level interlock at two key junctions: the transverse concrete wall balanced over the fireplace forms the rear wall of the upstairs master bedroom and concrete bathtub; on the opposite side by the staircase, the wood construction runs through to the ground level. Two differing construction methods join in mutual dependency. What emerges is a static balancing act that unleashes an energetic, expansive sense of space and engenders an architectural language rich in associations.

The house is planned on garden grounds in a quiet residential area with mature trees. Huge oak, beech and maple trees form the surroundings for the house, which embeds itself naturally and calmly in the space. It is the emphasis on the horizontal and the regular sequence of supports that give the building this calm and strength. A careful balance between mass and transparency, between supports and beams, and difference and agreement. A central corridor leads through the house, at the end of which there is a sculpture behind a window. The room sequence opens to the east or west side; only the last room, the living room, lies on both sides and thus has morning and evening sun. It is a meandering sequence of rooms that spans between the two courtyards, one of which extends down to the basement and naturally illuminates it. The circular openings interrupt the stringency. They are penetrations and thus an induced act of power, but nevertheless function as a relaxing moment as they break with the regularity. The circle is also found in the existing house with semicircular annex, which is located in the north of the plot, and creates a connection as a design feature.

The project is located in the industrial zone of Allapattah, north of Miami. In the immediate vicinity are warehouses, train tracks and rows of shipping containers and trucks. The property is a deserted, long and narrow remnant of almost a kilometer in length, directly along the tracks. Along with many cars and buses, the place is used as a laundry and junkyard, and there is a cubic blue house. This house and its materiality, color and dimension form the starting point for the architecture, which is defined by color, light and openness. A layering of offset wall panels placed in front and the steel supports on top of them create a tense structure and sequences. Particular attention is paid to the horizontal, which is very present and creates the relationships between the different uses.

An apartment building, built in the early 1900s in the Gundeldinger district of Basel, forms the starting point for the conversion project. The apartments on the lower three floors have been carefully renovated in the character of the existing building fabric. The top apartment has been converted into a spacious maisonette with the attic above. The extension moves within the existing roof slopes, only a dormer and a terrace to the courtyard form a spatial extension. There are different geometric basic forms such as the round skylight, the glass blocks, the built-in nested bookcases and the fish-bellied chimney, which in combination with the rich primary colors green and blue, refer to a recourse to the style of Art Nouveau at the beginning of the 20th century. Archetypal elements form the vocabulary of the design and, in the interplay of shapes and colors and light and shadow, lead to a playfulness and diversity of the space.

The new pavilion nestles thoughtfully on the hillside of the former garden of a spacious artist’s villa belonging to the Swiss artist Hans Erni, which was built around 1950 in the modern style. A curved concrete structure that merges at the front and supports the roof becomes a design feature. The solution allows for maximum cross-corner views to the northeast and southwest, each with a garden and a view of a park. Behind the arched structure is a staircase that leads to the roof garden. The curve arises from two contentual moments. On the one hand, the curve is taken from the drawings of the artist Hans Erni, in whose work movement and animal drawings play a major role, thus creating a strong connection to the history of the place and the man. On the other hand, the curve is somewhat imported, because it can be read as a fallen pillar of the Palacio Planalto by Oscar Niemeyer in Brasilia, also created in the 1960s. The form is legitimized in its content in many ways and is furthermore the most coherent architectural solution for bringing the loads together rather than being vertically borne at the corners, where the views would be disturbed. The curve is both a narrative moment and a maximally reduced formal approximation of the load transfer and gives the architecture a strong attraction, harmony and tension.

The roof extension has been constructed using prefabricated wood elements. The upper floor of the two-story rooftop apartment has been inserted between two sidewalls that span 9 meters from the firewall of one neighboring house to the other, forming a bridge-like element that serves a key structural role. They allow for an open, column-free floor plan and support the roof like two oversized center purlins. A narrow, longitudinally oriented staircase with closely spaced vertical slats connects the two levels. On the upper level, conceived as a house within a house, is a bedroom. Directly below are the main living area, kitchen, bathroom, and an enclosed room. The design of the structure and the useable surface area on the second floor allow for the ceiling of the living area to extend on both sides to the upper level. Penetrating the sidewalls and containing built-in components for books, the windows emanate a reinforcing quality. The chrome window reveals reflect a high degree of light, contrasting with the darkly varnished structural spruce wood construction.

The new Museum of Bavarian History is positioned in a significant location on the Danube River in the middle of the city of Regensburg. The new museum building creates a poised impression, completing the previously unfinished city fragment. The working method lies in viewing the building volumes of the city as a single mass out of which empty spaces can be cut. The resulting figure-ground relationship between built and spatial forms leads to a textured structure of buildings and volumes. The main entrance is on the important Danube façade of the new building. Having entered the museum, the visitor arrives directly into a generous foyer. Attached to this, and arranged around the central courtyard, are spaces for temporary exhibitions or events. The ‘Bayernhimmel’ or Bavarian Sky is the final space and it creates the zenith of the exhibition. The basic form of the Bayernhimmel room is cuboid and it can therefore be flexibly used. Nonetheless, it possesses an important singularity, for the room is surrounded and accentuated by a further spatial level. This pared-back zone consists of two opposing staircases that lead to a common destination from where the visitor enjoys a wonderful view of the old city, the Danube and the cathedral. From the exterior, the opening in the façade appears as a fresh interpretation of a classical frieze. The opposing staircases both shift the height level and represent a sequence of interior to exterior, past to present. The city and its architecture and structure are understood as the theatre of daily life. The Bayernhimmel is a grandstand from which a view of our city stage is revealed, as well as the meeting point between the museum world within and the contemporary world outside.