Straw spun into gold – “Houses of the Year 2023” award winners

The new building blends modestly and naturally into the historic village center of Pfaffenhofen. The compact, single-storey house with a kneeling storey and high pitched roof is clad in silver fir. It rests on a slightly cantilevered concrete cross with four corner supports. Anyone who associates the architecture with a “barn” is more right than they might think: the building by Atelier Kaiser Shen is a straw bale house. Together with the client, the Stuttgart office took on the challenge of creating an exemplary example of future-oriented ecological building in rural regions. The semi-detached house scores with a remarkable balance sheet: those responsible claim to have saved 95 percent of the estimated CO2 value of a comparable, thermally insulated solid house. Another special feature is that the architecture is divided into twelve rooms of 16 square meters each and, by cleverly interlocking the semi-detached houses, makes it possible to create equivalent living space – or even divide it into additional apartments. The rooms have no fixed function and can always be individualized without major structural interventions.

Open-use, space-saving, recyclable and ecologically future-oriented are the characteristics of the residential building, which are not only entirely in line with the spirit of this issue of Baumeister, but also impressed the “House of the Year” jury. With their straw bale house, Atelier Kaiser Shen prevailed against 131 submissions and was awarded first prize in the competition organized by Callwey Verlag for the thirteenth time.