New Loft Building, Cologne

Arno Brandlhuber  Bernd Kniess 


Ehrenfeld offers, amidst workshops and industrial warehouses, the easy-going and carefree environment that creators and freelance professionals look for in order to live and work under one same roof. In this Cologne neighborhood, the New Loft building provides twelve individual dwellings, each comprising a double-height space and another single-height one occupying two-thirds of the usable floor area. In eight different combinations, the L formation of these two main zones makes for spatial continuity while also facilitating functional differentiation. To allow for future loft extensions, a covered gallery concentrates the accesses while serving as a structural counterweight. A translucent enclosure of plastic reinforced with fiberglass hides the concrete surfaces behind an iridescent and changing veil of greenish reflections...[+]