11.01.2025

Residential house on the Ammersee by Florian Nagler

Building design

Florian Nagler Architekten have built a simple and sustainable home in Mitterfischen am Ammersee that is both luxurious and multi-layered.

Florian Nagler Architekten have built a residential building in Mitterfischen am Ammersee whose qualities are discreet but clearly recognizable. At the same time, the architect is using the new building to test a new version of his “simply build” concept.

Mitterfischen is Bavaria straight out of a picture book. Gentle green hills at the foot of which stretches the Ammersee. The famous Andechs monastery greets you with its towers and the Alps loom on the horizon. Although Munich is less than 50 kilometers away, the town has not developed into a millionaire’s retreat. This is not the case everywhere on the Ammersee. The development of the residential streets is inconsistent and reflects the development of Mitterfischen. Old courtyards and the first detached houses from the pre-war period, alongside owner-occupied homes from the seventies and eighties. In the new millennium, more sophisticated new buildings were also added. Lots of wood as a reminiscence of Alpine construction, large windows, restrained modern forms – houses that are often depicted in home magazines.

Supernormal in Mitterfischen

The new building by Florian Nagler Architekten, which has now been constructed on such a residential street in Mitterfischen, does not belong to any of these house types. At a cursory glance, one could make the mistake of thinking it is banal. However, Nagler’s approach here is closer to that of British designer Jasper Morrison. Morrison coined the idea of the “super normal” – a design that aims to create ideal archetypes. His works are therefore always based on forms that have long since become aesthetic common property. Florian Nagler’s house on Ammersee, with its massive first floor, its upper floor with dark-painted wooden cladding and its red pitched roof, has thousands of relatives in the Munich area.

The differences to this relationship become apparent at second glance. The first floor, for example, is not plastered masonry. It is made of solid lightweight concrete. This is because the detached house is a direct descendant of Nagler’s experimental buildings in Bad Aibling. These are intended to both illustrate and test Nagler’s approach of “simply building”(see Baumeister 11/21). Florian Nagler has erected one building each in Bad Aibling as a solid timber construction, a solid concrete construction and a solid brick construction. It is an attempt to make building manageable and sustainable again. The first floor in Mitterfischen is also single-skin and unreinforced. In contrast, Florian Nagler Architekten constructed the upper floor from insulating, solid timber elements. The new building on Lake Ammersee is therefore absolutely state of the art in terms of construction technology and sustainability.

Simple luxury

Aesthetically, Florian Nagler plays a subtle game of confusion in Mitterfischen. It starts with the colors – or rather the lack of color. It almost seems as if Nagler Architekten have laid a delicate veil of gray over the house, giving it a slight blurring compared to the neighboring buildings. It seems less present than the neighboring buildings, almost somewhat ethereal. Yet all the outlines, edges, gaps and openings have been worked with the utmost precision. The entire house exudes an enormous quality of craftsmanship that makes it appear very dignified, even luxurious, despite its modest size.

The fine carpentry work that is evident throughout Nagler’s buildings is continued inside. The two-storey living space in the center of the house reveals the different construction materials of the two floors. While the walls on the first floor feature almost sculpturally shaped concrete, the area above is dominated by light-colored softwood. Here, too, a second glance is needed to recognize the well thought-out design behind the superficial simplicity. But that is intentional. Florian Nagler’s house in Mitterfischen is not intended to impress anyone. It wants to convince those who take the time to look at it more closely.

Another very simple house in a dreamlike landscape: Villa by Atelier ordinaire on Lac de Gérardmer

11.11.2024

Event

Architecture Biennale 2021: In the Austrian Pavilion

Building design

Editor-in-chief Fabian Peters takes you to the 2021 Architecture Biennale in Venice.

Editor-in-chief Fabian Peters is currently in Venice. He is taking you on a tour of the pavilions, like here in the Austrian Pavilion.

In their project, the two curators of the Austrian pavilion, Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer, examine the manifestations and effects of platform urbanism. As part of their research, they have ultimately identified and categorized the physical manifestations of the digital and platform industry that are typical of the times with great precision. To present their findings, Mörtenböck and Mooshammer chose different forms of presentation – both artistic and more documentary. The artistic approaches to the topic include the two slogans that greet visitors at the entrance to the two wings of the pavilion: “Access is the new capital” and “The platform is my boyfriend“.

An installation of stools has already been set up in front of the pavilion, allowing the words “we like” to be read from a distance and in an extremely “instagrammable” way. The stools are the kind of DIY furniture that can be found in countless internet companies today – especially those that have long since outgrown start-up status. Dozens of examples of such contemporary phenomena are depicted on two walls of the pavilion in the form of patent drawings – from the Corporate Campus and the Co-Working Headphones to the Food Truck and the Vertical Forest to the Corporate Bus and the Pop-up Container Market. They leave the interpretation of their findings to the visitors, who can stretch out on the pavilion terrace on the currently ubiquitous outdoor lounge furniture.

01.11.2024

Trick

Otto Dix in Colmar

Building design

A major Dix exhibition is currently running in Colmar. It focuses on the reception of the Isenheim Age by the German artist. A highlight of the show has been restored for the occasion. An insight. Since the beginning of October, the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar, Alsace, has been showing the major special exhibition “Otto Dix – Isenheim Altarpiece” and is exploring the extent to which […]

A major Dix exhibition is currently running in Colmar. It focuses on the reception of the Isenheim Age by the German artist. A highlight of the show has been restored for the occasion. An insight.

The Unterlinden Museum in Colmar, Alsace, has been showing the major special exhibition “Otto Dix – Isenheim Altarpiece” since the beginning of October and explores the extent to which Otto Dix’s work was influenced by Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. At the same time, the museum is also honoring the 125th anniversary of the artist’s birth and the 500th anniversary of the mural altar, the museum’s main attraction, which is on permanent display there.

“I saw the Isenheim Altarpiece twice, an enormous work of unheard-of boldness and freedom beyond all composition or construction and inexplicably mysterious in its contexts,” wrote Otto Dix to his wife Martha on September 9, 1945. This letter can be seen with more than 100 works by the painter at the Museum Unterlinden. Paintings, drawings, prints and archive material from all over the world, including loans from major public collections such as the Musée national d’art moderne in Paris, the MoMA in New York and the Vatican Museums.

The Isenheim Altarpiece, created by Matthias Grünewald in the 16th century, has inspired many artists such as Böcklin, Klee, Baselitz and Picasso since its rediscovery in the late 19th century. However, Dix referred to the Isenheim Altarpiece throughout his work, emphasizes curator Frédérique Goerig-Hergott.

Restored highlight

One of the highlights of the exhibition is the triptych “Madonna in front of barbed wire” from the Maria Frieden church in Berlin-Mariendorf, which is rarely lent out and has been restored by the museum’s conservators. It is the last triptych painted by Dix in 1945 and was intended for the Catholic chapel of the prison camp where Dix was sent shortly before the end of the Second World War. It shows the Virgin and Child as well as St. Paul and St. Peter in front of a crowd of prisoners of war and a landscape of houses destroyed by the war. “The most important part of the restoration was to check the adhesion of the paint layer and to locate any areas at risk of flaking. We also carried out a light cleaning of the paint layer, which meant minimal intervention in the paint substance,” explains restorer Carole Juillet. The wooden panels are in excellent condition and have been primed with gesso to prevent the wood from warping.

Examination of the painting revealed three different overpaintings. The oldest overpainting can be found in the area of the sky and the clouds in the middle panel. The overpaintings on the panel with St. Peter in the area of his cloak and in the area of Mary’s dress could be by Dix himself. The technique in oil/tempera is similar to that of the entire triptych. Juillet continues: “We have benefited greatly from this loan, as it is always interesting to be able to study an artist’s painting technique at close quarters and thus contribute a piece of the mosaic to Otto Dix research.”

Interested parties can view the restored painting with its overpaintings and its reference to Grünewald in the exhibition “Otto Dix – Isenheim Altarpiece” until January 30, 2017.