The Hotel Bostalsee occupies an advantageous position in its natural surroundings, overlooking a serene lake from a wooded promontory. GRAFT’s design aims to build on and enrich the character of the location.
The building figure is a product of the surrounding topography. The hotel connects the realm of the wood with the expanse of the lake, mediating between the land and the water.
Guests arrive at the hotel through oak woodland, barely seeing the lake. The path to the hotel leads on towards two green hills on which the main section of the two-storey hotel rests. The lobby is situated beneath it at the natural gap between the hills, revealing a breathtaking view over the lake as one enters. The lobby frames the sunset which in turn animates the space with the cycle of nature. An open-air terrace with fireplace offers guests an opportunity to enjoy the evening spectacle.
Location: Am Bostalsee 1, 66625 Gonnesweiler, Germany
Photography: Michael Moser, Airteam
Client: HOTELKULTUR GMBH & Co. KG
Founding Partners: Lars Krückeberg, Wolfram Putz, Thomas Willemeit
Project Lead: Arne Wegner
Project Team: Inga Anger, Marvin Bratke, Konstantin Buhr, Alexandra Bunescu, Raphael Hemmer, Johanna Kuntze, Filipa Leal de Carvalho, Christian Litz, Antonio Luque, Frank Petters, Rita D. Schult, Berta Sola, Alexandra Tobescu, Aurelius Weber, Max Wittkopp, Anna Wittwer
With the Rooftop Office, CROSS Architecture has created a prismatic building structure for the renowned furnishing house Mathes in the middle of Aachen, which not only opens up unique perspectives on the cathedral and the old town, but also brings working in the Open Space Office to a new level. In addition, the project provides a positive impulse with regard to the redensification of urban areas. Mid-sized town Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) ist he westernmost city in Germany.
CROSS Architecture has given the 1960s existing building a progressive look with a 400 sqm prismatic structure. “This building needed an extraordinary architecture that was appropriate to the particularity of the location,” explains Markus Sporer, Founding Partner CROSS Architecture. The result is a structure with a trapezoidal basic figure that is created by the play of differently inclined window and façade fronts – tilted outwards on the cathedral side and inwards on the other sides. There is a terrace all around. The cubature is derived from the urban planning situation in the immediate vicinity of the World Heritage Site Aachen Cathedral and Town Hall, the consideration of lines of sight and orientation.
The Haus am Buddenturm is located in the historic city centre of Münster. The street presents three building lines with regard to the plot: the two building lines along the row of houses that border the plot on the east/west and the third that forms the plot boundary. These alignments are perceptible on the building façade. This reveals an urban scale whose typology is collectively rooted in the historic centre of Münster. The façade towards the street has three openings: in the form of a copper façade on the ground floor, as corner glazing with a deep recess in the façade on the first floor and as an opening with a lesser recess on the second floor. These recesses provide a view of the medieval Buddenturm. The staggering of the façade is also visible inside. In the stairwell area, the house increasingly fans out towards natural light which enters the house through glazing in the eave walls and on the ridge of the roof. The house is arranged over four levels. On the ground floor are the entrance, a multi-functional area, the inner courtyard and garage. The living and dining areas, kitchen and a roof terrace with views of the Observanten Church follow on the first floor. Bedrooms and studies along with bathrooms are found on the remaining floors. The texture of the hand moulded bricks fired in a ring kiln creates a link to the historic surroundings. In the interior, the concrete is untreated, the floorboards have been laid on sleepers.
R11 is a roof extension to a four storey building in the Munich inner city near the central station.
The foundations of the existing 1980s building had limited carrying capacity and did not allow for a simple extension of this size. Instead, it was first necessary to demolish the reinforced concrete structure on the fourth floor before extending upwards with a more lightweight construction. The new structure of massive timber, clad in steel encloses two new floors and a mezzanine gallery. In total, three separate living units have been created.
On the site of the old Tivoli on Krefelder Strasse in Aachen, Germany, a new, attractive residential area with high-quality office and commercial spaces has been built. The new 3-star Hampton by Hilton Aachen Tivoli hotel of the Hilton Group is located halfway between the motorway and – within walking distance – the historic city centre and the famous Aachen cathedral.
With its deliberate elevation of the cubature and an excptional façade design, it not only marks the access to the new urban quarter, but also the important entrance situation at the foot of the Lousberg.
The provision of housing supply is most likely the biggest challenges in our cities in the future. Thus, the housing estates of the 50s, 60s and 70s do not go unnoticed on the outskirts of the city. Where developers divide the original properties of the local individual development into small pieces with oversized buildings, the border between city and countryside blurs. What if we continue to condense the city and treat the country differently?
Situated on a fairy tale-like plot just outside of the City of Munich, HouseH is a suburban dream of the Sixties. While the luxury of this estate is the beautiful outside-space, our aim was it, to keep the additionally built volume as low as possible. The character of the main-house as a single storey building with a huge roof remains, even been completely reorganized and restructured. The sculptural aspect of the roof and the outside terraces’ is reinterpreted and strengthened by design surgeries as one of the key aspects of the sixties architecture.
To avoid additional volume, al additional functions are strategically situated in the old ensemble of outbuildings, as the guesthouse is located in the completely refurbished cabin from 1920.
A new production hall in Lower Bavaria constructed by ip company, a North German window manufacturer, is a greenfield project in a business park in the market town of Langquaid. The hall brings together several different functions under one roof: production facilities, staff rooms and showroom. The geometry of this long building is determined by the production processes involved in window manufacture. The hall is divided by a block with the staff rooms and offices separating the production area from the showroom. This block has dark panelling on the one side and the colour code of the product range on the other.
With this significant building AllesWirdGut marks the structural upgrading of this part of the inner city of Erlangen in Bavaria. The new Provincial Government Office forms the pivotal element of the district development. The development responds to regional and supraregional relations and links important inner-city connections. Several finger-like structures gather around an atrium and resemble a four-leaf clover. Open spaces are created around the building by moving the building from its immediate property lines, which complement and enhance the public space in terms of quality.
At the foot of the Harz Mountains, in the Schierke district belonging to Wernigerode, a historic and listed ice stadium has been renovated.
In 2013, GRAFT won the European architecture tendering for the reactivation of the former natural ice stadium and convinced the jury with their unique roof construction. The task of the competition was to transform the stadium area into a multi-functional arena. Cultural as well as sport events should be possible throughout the year- independent of weather conditions. The existing natural stone terraces and the listed wooden referee tower were asked to be retained and included into the new design. Sanitary facilities, technical services, administration, and changing rooms as well as the gastronomy should find its place in two functional buildings completing the arena.
DIA –Dittel Architekten and die wegmeister agency have created a new interactive world of experience for visitors to the new TransnetBW main control centre building in Wendlingen. The aim of the concept was to illustrate and bring to life the complex contents of the transmission system operator. The focus was on playful communication of information in digital and analogue form, the realisation of the information to create a functional design concept as well as on an intuitive visitor orientation. The architecture firm wma architekten wöhr mieslinger assoziierte in Stuttgart is responsible for the new modern building.
The visitors’ area extends over a light-filled passage which extends from the reception area to a gallery on the first floor and an interactive zone. On this path, the visitor dives deeper and deeper into the subject matter, the highlight being an unobstructed view of the control stand with its 12-meter-wide, high-resolution monitor wall. Here, the system management engineers control the high-voltage grid for the control area of Baden-Württemberg, keeping it in balance in close cooperation with the neighbouring German and international control areas.
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