Tiny footprint, spacious building

The designers from Loweg Architekten had only 10 metres of width to work with on the 420-m² plot in Stuttgart, Germany. The project was commissioned by Benedikt Pedde, an architect who works at Loweg. He wanted to build a town house with all the amenities of a new office and family home despite the narrow floor plan.
 
“The layout and gradient were a challenge”, says Pedde, referring to the sloping left side of the property leading to a rear parcel of land that is 9 metres higher. “But the location in East Stuttgart is a dream.”

A narrow glass tower framed by dark bricks and divided by window frames rises behind a triple garage made of exposed concrete. On the street side, the ground floor is hidden by the garage but burrows back deep into the hillside. This creates around 130 m² of office space for the six employees, which is similar in size to the total living space on the three upper floors.
 
An atrium supplies the office unit with daylight and planted courtyards on three levels create spaces to withdraw and relax. The available space in the upper living area is enlarged by two bays. The pitched roof is extensively planted and opens onto a roof terrace facing the garden.

Besides the large windows, it is the brick façade that gives the exterior of the town house an expressive appeal. “Naturally, we also wanted to reference the immediate surroundings without the building fading into the background. So, in addition to glass, we used complimentary dark brown waterstruck bricks with anthracite nuances”, says Pedde. The Moana Eco-brick^® building now stands out from the lighter façades of the adjacent houses. The bricks have a slightly rustic surface and textured appearance typical of waterstruck bricks.
 
But the brick was not only chosen for its appearance: the Moana Eco-brick^® is around 45 mm slimmer than conventional bricks and so creates more space in the interior. “The Eco-brick^® helped us maximise the available space”, the architect explains. “A depth of 7 cm instead of 11.5 cm doesn‘t sound like much difference, but it gives us around 4 m² of extra space over the whole height of the building.” Furthermore, the narrow format reduces the CO₂ footprint to 20–30 % below that of standard bricks per square metre of façade. This project used smaller quantities of premium-quality building materials to achieve an optimum result.