St. Joseph House / Wolfgang Tschapeller

Architects: Wolfgang Tschapeller ZT GmbH
Location: Lower Austria, Austria
Design Team: Wolfram Mehlem, Jesper Bork
Photographs: Lukas Schaller, Roland Krauss, Courtesy of Wolfgang Tschapeller

St. Joseph is a concrete form to be made habitable independent of the building site. The concrete shell is placed at the edge of the remainder of a plain along the Danube floodplains. Its basic measurements are 615 cm by 620 cm by 2230 cm. The concrete form is set on 4 supports – one one-legged element, two two-legged elements and one three-legged element. Its distance from the ground ranges from 120 cm to 210 cm.

A second form, soft, white and independent of the outer shell, is set within the concrete shell. The white form opens up and programs – makes habitable, if you wish – the concrete shell’s inner area, which is 2165 cm long and approx. 515 cm high. These are two interleaved forms, each with a different hardness and materiality.