The industry meets at the Info Days 2019 Advertorial Article Parallax Article

The industry meets at the 2019 Info Days

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Thomas Kröger has built a luxurious apartment building on the banks of the Isar in Munich. However, the architect’s design was less concerned with ostentation than with a sensitive dialog with the historic neighboring buildings.

Thomas Kröger has built a luxurious apartment building on the banks of the Isar in Munich. However, the architect was less concerned with ostentation in his design than with a sensitive dialog with the historic neighboring buildings.

The view from the roof terrace of the new building is impressive. On one side you can see the Isar river, which flows in front of the building, and on the other the famous Munich city skyline with St. Peter’s, the Frauenkirche and the Theatine Church. The duplex penthouse, to which the terrace belongs, would probably be called a “trophy home” in the USA. Incidentally, the apartment has already been sold, as have all but one of the other units in the Erhardtstrasse 10 project. The interior work is currently being completed in line with the new owner’s wishes. In future, he will be able to enjoy the view through the two-storey window wall, over which architect Thomas Kröger has placed a semi-transparent roof made of copper slats. Large wave-shaped openings, which look like dormers from a distance, showcase the view of the Isar.

The copper roofscape is one element with which Kröger fits his house into the riverside row with its late historicist and Art Nouveau façades. Another is the enormous and expansive bay window with which the architect closes off the street façade to one side. In addition, the details of the house show a great deal of decorative pleasure, which it shares with the neighboring buildings. The most striking feature is the painting on the façade, a kind of multicolored serrated band that runs across all the wall surfaces. Kröger is alluding to the sgraffito and wall paintings that were widespread in Munich up until the 1950s, which are apparently currently experiencing a small renaissance – Hild and K also had their recently completed commercial building on Weinstrasse lavishly decorated with paintings(see Baumeister 5/2021).

Naturally, Kröger was required to make the best possible use of the deep and irregularly cut plot. As a result, two further transverse buildings with side wings are now staggered behind the front building. The front of the two inner courtyards is covered by a roof with a huge circular cut-out – an element that is reminiscent of both an oversized opaion and round courtyards, such as those found at the Villa Farnese in Caprarola. This courtyard effectively continues the sequence of rooms that begins in the foyer of the house and then leads down a few steps. According to Kröger himself, the upper-class apartment buildings in Milan from the 1950s with their elegant entrances were the inspiration for this solution.

The stairwells, on the other hand, are small. A lot of black also contributes to making these areas of the building appear somewhat undersized. In the larger apartments in the front building, however, the elevator leads directly to the entrance area, so that the stairwell takes on the role of an escape route rather than an access route. Some of the apartments in the first rear building have complex layouts and are lit by the two courtyards and additional light wells. The floor plans here bear witness to the exploitation pressure that clearly played a role in the planning.

Despite this and the challenging shape of the plot, Thomas Kröger has undoubtedly succeeded in designing a well-designed building that blends harmoniously into the cityscape. It radiates a self-assured and comfortable bourgeoisie that one would wish for elsewhere. The purchase prices of the apartments in the front building, on the other hand, can hardly be described as bourgeois; they cost – or have cost – a mid-single-digit million euro amount, because, as mentioned at the beginning, only one last apartment is still available.

Speaking of expensive housing: architect Jean-Christophe Quinton has achieved the opposite with his Parisian residential building with a sandstone façade, which houses social housing.