A landscape composed of single-family housing estates and blocks of flats interspersed with a sequence of rubbish sheds and islands of greenery. Urban chaos and aesthetic clamour… This is how the landscape of the Black Forest, one of the districts of Ruda Śląska, can be briefly described. Most of the suburbs of other cities in Poland can be described in a similar way. How to create valuable architecture in such places? The answer is a proposal by architects from BaH studio, who prepared designs for a single-family house and two semi-detached houses. They created minimalist white houses that tone down the architectural tone of the neighbourhood in the Black Forest in Ruda Śląska
The building proposed by the architects represents a design manifesto. They decided not to engage in a dialogue with the cacophony of shapes, textures and colours, and instead of adding further tones to the spatial noise – to introduce some silence. The austere, monochromatic volumes – stripped of superfluous colour and ornament – are a spatial representation of the formal and colourful minimum. This is an architecture of contrast, a design tabula rasa – setting a new visual standard in a disorganised space.
If visual noise manifests itself in a multiplicity of plastic motifs: divergent lines of roofs and facades, an excess of colours, a variety of textures, disharmonious proportions – both of solids and the space between them, then visual silence will manifest itself in space with elements from the opposite end of the spectrum. The full experience of all these positive values, however, is not possible without adequate preparation. This is why the structure of the building has been organised in such a way that the user is first cut off from the distracting noise and then gradually introduced into spaces that allow for relaxation and settling into the present moment. The symbolic and formal boundary, a kind of acoustic screen, is a high ribbon of fence, here and there passing into the outer wall of the building, which with a decisive movement cuts off the space of the ascetic residential enclave from the sweltering surroundings. The horizontal line of the fence resembles the form of a podium on which the cubic volumes of the upper storey are set. This visual elevation of the building further enhances the impression of separation from the surroundings, this time on a vertical plane.
From the front, the whole complex is reminiscent of an inaccessible monolith, which becomes progressively more porous and open to the outside as one moves deeper into the plot, from the public entrance area to the private garden area. The entrances to the building are signalled by arcades in the form of an intimate patio or covered recess that herald the first ‘cracks’ in the compact monolith, without nullifying the impression of the inaccessibility of the windowless plinth and the heavy overhang above it.
Further on, the observer, passing into the depths of the building, finds himself in an entrance zone threaded through a viewing axis ending in an opening onto the garden at the far end of the building, so that he remains in an indirect relationship with the outside. Light is diffused here, seeping through a doorway at the end of the corridor. The corridor then transitions to the light-flooded living area with its large windows opening onto the semi-open patios, which this time already allow direct interaction with the outside. This kind of shaping of the building plan, where the inner daytime space of the building is interspersed with the cubic, recessed threads of the patios, allows a conscious shaping of the frames to which the user is exposed.
The intimate spaces of the patios, with their closed composition, allow full control over the arrangement of the groupings of greenery and small architecture, like consciously and harmoniously composed frames of painting. The tectonics of the interior, like that of the building’s exterior, is maintained in an ascetic style. The aim of limiting the means of artistic expression is to create a neutral background architecture for calming down and contemplating the soothing greenery of the garden. This effect has been achieved through attention to complete harmony of proportion, synthesising lines, details and textures. Also important is the deliberate use of light by gradually increasing its intensity in successive spaces, taking into account their character, and limiting the colour palette to white, which emphasises the green surroundings by way of contrast. Thus, the path through the building can be likened to abruptly isolating the observer from visual noise in order to gradually tame him or her into a harmonious exterior.
Another key advantage of shaping the building on the principle of interweaving the positive of the volume and the negative of the patio is that the emptiness of the patio creates a kind of green buffer to protect users from the prying eyes of neighbours. The façades facing the neighbouring plots are planned as windowless, while the windows of the building are mostly set in the walls facing the patios. Thanks to this design, the windows mostly open onto the patios, and in the case of exposure to the neighbour’s plot, the window is withdrawn to approximately 7-8 metres from the boundary (instead of the 4 metres required by law) and obscured by green patio compositions.
The heart of the single-family house is the two-storey living area with a long, ten-seater dining table, a kitchenette with an extensive island and a mezzanine above. The living area opens up onto the outdoor patios through extensive glazing. A single storey alcove with a seating area adjoins the dining area to the south, followed by a south-facing terrace as an indirect continuation of the living area. The patios, although located outdoors, can be treated as an outdoor living area thanks to their partial shelter from the weather and their direct proximity to the living zone.
The layout of the living area is based on a cross-shaped plan with a representative dining room at the intersection of its arms. Four functional blocks are located between the arms of the living zone, comprising the entrance zone, the garage zone and the parents’ and children’s bedroom zones.
The sleeping areas have openings facing the patios to the north and the garden to the south. This arrangement of the building’s functional layout is a reminiscence of the central plan. The main similarity is the distinctly higher volume in the centre of the establishment, bathed in daylight through windows facing the four corners of the world and set at different levels, providing all-day, multidimensional illumination of the central area of the house. In addition, the centrally located two-storey space is adjoined, like an aisle, by single-storey recesses with a lounge and kitchenette on the north-south axis and patios on the east-west axis.
The semi-detached houses are taller, two-storey buildings. The functional scheme continues the recess motif – this time the positives of the internal spaces are interspersed with the negatives in the form of external terraces.
On the ground floor of the houses, there is an entrance and technical zone located to the north, and a living zone containing a living room with kitchenette and adjacent terraces. On the first floor, on the other hand, the night zone is located – the master bedroom and two children’s rooms equipped with bathrooms and dressing rooms.
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About the studio: BaH studio is a young studio based in Katowice, based on experience gained in various studios in Poland and abroad, looking for new and unusual solutions to architectural problems. Through their experience, they strive not only to be designers, but a kind of medium balancing the worlds of culture, art, architecture and nature. They do not limit themselves to typical solutions and look for the hidden value of every object they work on. As they say, this often leads them to new and innovative ideas that surprise their clients in a positive way.
design: BaH studio
team: Mateusz Białek, Marcin Harnasz, Łukasz Marjański, Aleksandra Kapuścik, Katarzyna Marcol, Mikołaj Baczyński, Kacper Groń
Read also: Single-family house | Modernism | Minimalism | Interiors | Elevation | whiteMAD on Instagram