Two in One House / Triendl und fessler architekten

Architects: Triendl und fessler architekten
Location: Natters, Austria
Proyect Year: 2008
Photographs: Günther Wett

Project Area: 230.0 m2
Carport: 90 sqm

Near the Alpine town of Innsbruck and only a few curves on the road away from ski jump Bergisel, the work of Zaha Hadid, the duo of young architects triendl and fessler have designed a house for two families, which autonomously markedly stands out from its surroundings.

‘We did not want to cut much grass’, the clients jokingly explain their motives for construction of this two-in-one house. They did not see the immediate neighbourhood as threatening danger at all. The plot of 1500 m2, however, did have a complex topography: ‘The plot is very long and narrow, therefore it was soon clear that we were supposed to arrange the building like a chain, in order to be able to direct it toward the south’, say Karin Triendl and Patrick Fessler.

Apart from the size of the building and the existence of two entrances, nothing on the outside indicates the fact that this straight-lined building corpus is a house for two families. The sequence of movement is simple: past the garage with plenty of room for storing ‘Alpine’ vehicles, from mountain bikes to motocross machines, along a single wall behind which there is a sheltered patio, past houses A and B into the garden.