Architects: Reuter Raeber Architects
Area: 240 m²
Year: 2016
Photography: Eik Frenzel
Project Team: Patrick Reuter, Lukas Raeber
Engineering: WMM Ingenieure / Andreas Bayer, Gilbert Santini
HVAC: Beat Joss & Partner / Beat Joss
Building Physics: Ehrsam & Partner / Seraphin Burri
City: Basel
Country: Switzerland
House in Riehen, a residential building designed by Reuter Raeber Architects in Switzerland, has seamlessly integrated a horizontal structure into the hillside contours, blending interior and exterior spaces fluidly. Completed in 2016, the house uses contrasting materials like glass, concrete, wood, and metal to balance heaviness and lightness, creating a dynamic interplay between load and support. The design incorporates thoughtful spatial flow, a solid wood construction, and strategic interlocking of concrete and wood elements to generate an expansive architectural language.
Glass, concrete, wood, and metal form the basis for creating rich associations between space, structure, material, and location. This results in a house marked by contrasting interactions between heavy and light, load and support.
The horizontal building structure is carefully integrated into the hillside’s contours, achieving a seamless transition from interior to exterior. Narrow retaining walls and the surrounding yard shape a courtyard setting, preserving the feel of the sloping terrain. Steps delineate the spatial flow from the entryway to the living, dining, and kitchen areas, echoing the descending outdoor terrain. The floor, fireplace, and two exterior load-bearing shear walls are made of concrete, creating a homogeneous structure that encases the living room and supports the overlying wood construction.
A solid wood construction of four exterior shear walls and two transverse walls forms the structure of the upper story, where the bedrooms are located. The wood is exposed inside, while glass and metal surfaces form a weather barrier outside. The wood structure rests on two vertical concrete shear walls, cantilevering to the front and back, and is stabilized by steel tension bars on the east and west windows, holding the wooden shear walls together. The ground floor ceiling is hung front to back by tension rods attached to two transverse steel roof beams.
The concrete ground level and the wood upper level interlock at two key points: the transverse concrete wall 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 extends to the ground level. Two differing construction methods join in mutual dependency, resulting in a static balance that creates an energetic, expansive sense of space and a rich architectural language.
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Project Location
Address: Riehen, Basel 4125, Switzerland
Location is for general reference and may represent a city or country, not necessarily a precise address.
