PPAG

Description

The “house with the elephant skin” is situated in the lowland of the eastern Austrian province Burgenland in the middle of an old fruit orchard. The layout is kept simple but attentively designed: roughly 100 m2 floor area – organised around a central service core with entrance porch – are placed on slightly different levels and therefore each room has its own quality of space and offers different views of the surrounding orchard. Due to the tight budget of the client, planning work became an act of real research. With conventional façade and roof systems, it would not have been possible to keep within the cost constraints. A new economical external skin had to be developed: A decision was made in favour of a free wood construction with roof and walls made of packaging plywood. The outer layer is a sprayed polyurethane foam with an additional moisture-diffusing UV protection layer on the wall and a 2-3 mm coating to the roof. In spite of the minimal thickness of the walls (10 cm) and roof (15 cm) the construction fulfils the requirements of the local building regulations. By simple proportions of façade and windows the extraordinary appearance of the house is led back to a usual house in the province of Burgenland.