Like the proverbial sitcom siblings who split their room down the middle in an attempt to deal with seemingly insoluble differences of character, Leonard Hautum renovated a circa 1890 timber workshop on a hillside in Munich with a literal dividing line between past and present. This residential Two-Face was created, as the firm describes, by inserting a "sculpture made of insulating exposed concrete" into one of the region's traditional herbergshäusl (workman's cottages). But the split aesthetic wasn't just a formal exercise. A fire in the mid-'90s had left the structure heavily damaged, so the concrete section was brought in to replace the half that wasn't possible to preserve.
The contemporary half also "holds all technical installations necessary to contemporary living," completing the usual "character of the old, comfort of the new" dynamic central to the most beautifully invasive of renovations. For Leonard Hautum, the project was all about making the sections meld, "despite the hard clash, into a symbiotic whole."
· NOCKI / Leonard Hautum [Arch Daily]
· Nine Times Crumbling Buildings Got Glassy, Sexy Updates
· All conversions coverage
· All renovations coverage