bayer | uhrig
Redensification in the Hütschenhausen village centre
best architects 25
multi-family homes
Place
Kaiserslautern, Germany
Studio
Photos
Michael Heinrich
Description
Hütschenhausen belongs to the municipality of Ramstein-Miesenbach in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. The village has good traffic connections to Saarbrücken, Trier and Kaiserslautern. A residential park was originally planned in the centre of the village to replace dilapidated agricultural buildings, for which the municipality had drawn up a development plan tailored to a designated project developer. After the developer withdrew from the project and the site lay derelict for years, a local developer took over the site. He intends to keep the new ensemble in his own portfolio and make it available on the housing market for short and long-term tenants. In the first construction phase, nine detached houses were built in 2023, opening up the village centre as an alternative to building on greenfield sites. In 2024, the first of three planned three-storey buildings was completed, which borrows from the previous structures whose building fabric could not be saved. The new building defines a corner at the central intersection but does not impose itself formally, instead aiming to make an impact at second glance. The layout of the flats includes a spacious central hall that creates unusual diagonal sight lines. The construction is robust and simple: monolithic masonry, wooden windows, purlin roof. Energy is supplied autonomously via the ensemble’s own cold district heating network with geothermal probes and a heat pump. An apartment building and a medical centre will complete the complex.