Büro Konstrukt

Description

The Staffelnhof Nursing Home – built in 1965 as a winning competition project by the architectural partnership of Hans Howald and Ernst Gisel – is among those buildings in the inventory of the city of Lucerne that is considered worthy of preservation. The main architectural features of the existing building were the impressive figure it cut as a solitary sculptural monolith, the aubergine-coloured polychrome façades and the haptically fascinating mural effect of its pebble-dash plaster surfaces. All of these characteristics together give the building a distinctively expressive presence. For this reason, the project undertook to extend the building fabric using a kind of smoothing-out tactic. The sculptural monolith with extension should look as if it had never been built in any other way. The pebble-dash and the colour gradations were therefore preserved and supplemented. In collaboration with the artist Jörg Niederberger, a colour scheme was developed that juxtaposes three new tones with the three existing hues and brings them all together in a coherent new composition.