Kaspar Weyrer Strasse, Innsbruck

The residential project in Kaspar Weyrer Strasse was created in collaboration with Werner Burtscher. 

The architectural arrangement of the housing complex facilitates social contact within shared areas such as the underground garage or the private apartments.

Visibly anchored in plain sight, the staircases enable their residents to customize their individual entrance areas. This concept transfers people into the public space and does not conceal them within an introvert staircase. The spaces in-between the houses invite to pause, play or pursue horticultural activities. Each unit is accessible from the exterior through its own front door.

The draft follows the layout of the original housing development area between Schneeburggasse and the terrain edge above Höttinger Au and reinterprets it corresponding to contemporary aspects – not as one massive “super-block”, but as several single units with surrounding green spaces.

All apartment windows face east or west. The two-story solutions on the upper levels of the structure offer additional spatial qualities. Each apartment has at least one individual outdoor area such as west-facing gardens on ground level and west- or east-facing terraces on the upper floors. The measurements of the ground floor apartments are 4 x 13.85 meters.

In regards to its materiality this project commits itself fully to the local ecological architecture. The prefabricated supporting walls consist of cross-laminated timber, external ventilated insulation and silver fir cladding. The terrace surfaces are covered with pine duckboards while the remaining flat roofs are green with vegetation. The overriding conceptual simplicity is consistently sustained by the materiality of the inner skin of the structure consisting of unrefined timber walls, sanded floors, glass and tiling.

The housing complex in Kaspar-Weyrer-Straße 6 stands out as a grandiose example of modern and divergent urban living.