A major exhibition of JMW Turner’s work in an iconic exhibition venue, part of which was initially a leftover from the construction of the city’s underground rail network in the late 1960s. The design of the exhibition, which was organised by Lenbachhaus in collaboration with Tate Britain, was determined by an attempt to maximise how much material from the construction could be reused afterwards. No single-orientation walls were built, and no disposable elements were used in the assembly of the exhibition furniture.

A relatively simple, reusable wall system was employed, and built ‘as it comes’. A system of furniture elements was designed that could be configured to form different types and sizes of benches and tables that could adapt to the diverse spaces of the Lenbachhaus galleries. Textile panels were just cut from the roll. Each element was integrated into the fabric of exhibition spaces themselves without interfering too much with the aura that inevitably surrounds Turner’s gold-framed, extraordinary paintings.

Programme: Exhibition, Furniture System
Location: Munich, Germany
Year: 2023–2024
Team: Enrico Scomazzon and Carlo Grignani
Photography: Sebastian Schels and Simon Jüttner

A really small house for a family of three. Built without cement or adhesives. Foundations made of solid granite blocks, timber construction made entirely of untreated sawn timber thanks to the small spans. The outer walls were realized as prefabricated timber frame elements filled with hempcrete. Only the inner part of the 40 cm thick wall has a load-bearing function. In this way, the hempcrete can be applied to almost the entire surface on the outside. This minimizes thermal bridges and the lime plaster can be applied directly to the surface of the hempcrete without a substructure.

Programme: House
Location: Hinterschmiding, Germany
Year: 2022–
Team: Jennifer Nees, Sonja Braunmüller, Enrico Scomazzon
Structural Engineering: Merz Kley Partner
Photography: Simon Jüttner, Norbert Jüttner

A complex conglomerate of existing and in some cases listed buildings at the historical heart of Memmingen, in Bavaria. Having evolved and transformed over many centuries, the area was then closed off to the public and left to decay over the course of several decades. Now, however, its future is being rewritten in order to bring it back to life and enable it to operate as a vital, integral and changing piece of the city once again.

Programme: Mixed-Use Development
Location: Memmingen, Germany
Year: 2022–
Team: Sonja Braunmüller, Carlo Grignani, Alexandr Kulikov, Zeno Noichl, Nora Lindemann and Florian Roth
Photography: Sebastian Schels, Markus Lanz and Simon Jüttner

This former side building of a cheese factory, which was built in 1950, has been used as a workshop in recent decades. Now, its transformation as a self-built house insists on the use of only natural or recycled building materials and structural elements: untreated timber, natural insulation, clay floors and plaster, mainly. Reclaimed marble is used in some parts to heal the wounds in existing wall tiles, in the manner of Kintsugi. Under the roof, four identical rooms, each with one small window, are grouped around a central hall in order to respect the building’s clear and symmetrical structural logic. In the new hall, part of the ceiling is punctuated by a spiral staircase that not only leads down to the open plan ground floor, but at the same time connects the two levels of the garden through the house. New openings are exclusively made in the roof.
The main questions that arose at the outset of this project concerned how little could be done: what was the minimum that needed to happen to existing building for it to sustain its intended new use? How much actually needed to be removed from the site, and what could be retained? From these practical queries, though, a broader one emerged: how do we take a step back as designers and accept things as they are?

Programme: House, Conversion
Location: Bad Grönenbach, Germany
Year: 2022–
Team: Carlo Grignani
Photography: Simon Jüttner

Located in a small village near to Cabo de Gata, a desert-like nature reserve on the coast of Andalusia, is a concrete ruin that has been abandoned for 15 years. In its current state, the remnant structure is half cave, half architectonic curiosity. The design developed in response to this obscure but expressive object, while it has never been executed, is in effect a white cube that would conceal it behind a clean skin of plasterboard.

The approach governing this idea is to treat the structure and its traces of wear and tear with respect. A primary living space with a high ceiling would be sunken into the ground, providing shelter from the extreme temperatures that are often reached on hot summer days there. Natural materials such as compressed earth bricks, local marble and clay plaster would be introduced, mirroring the landscape around the site.

Programme: Apartment
Location: Cabo de Gata, Spain
Year: 2022–
Team: Carlo Grignani, Enrico Scomazzon
Photography: Simon Jüttner

This exhibition, which was presented at the NS-Dokumentationszentrum München and adapted from an earlier show at Mumok in Vienna, was dedicated to the photographic estate of the writer and publisher Heimrad Bäcker. It sought to explore his lifelong confrontation with the holocaust and his attempts to come to terms with it through art, having been active as a member of the NSDAP in his youth. Selected images were displayed alongside found objects from the concentration camps at Mauthausen and Gusen. When adapting the show from its former venue, the MDF that had been extensively used throughout the original installation in Vienna was salvaged and reinterpreted as a fine layer of wrapping paper for the exhibition’s content; a simple and sustainable ‘background’material. Pasted up against the immaculate concrete walls of the exhibition space in Munich, the objects appear suspended in the rigid concrete frame of the building and, due to the immediacy of their presence, take on an even stronger presence.

Programme: Exhibition
Location: Munich, Germany
Year: 2020–2021
Team: Markus Stolz
Photography: Sebastian Schels

A guesthouse, originally constructed as a single residence in the 1920s, that has been returned to its initial function as a family house. Due to a pest infestation, the historic timber frame of the building (which had only fairly recently been renovated) needed some surprising and quite urgent structural repairs in certain areas, and necessitated the dismantling of infrastructure and the construction of extensions to meet the needs of its new residents in others.
Triangular roofs that follow the boundaries of the building’s plot have been extended on two sides of the house, covering the relocated entrance on one flank and a new terrace on the other. A new underground extension and passageway links the property to its parking spaces, which sit below the garden.

Programme: House
Location: Burgberg im Allgäu, Germany
Year: 2021–2023
Team: Jonas Hamberger
Photography: Simon Jüttner

A long, narrow corridor leads to the interior spaces of this small corner flat in the 19th arrondissement of Paris. This corridor creates a generous threshold between the communal staircase for the building and the apartment itself, which makes it feel unexpectedly remote, even while it overlooks the nearby Jardins d’Éole and the railway tracks beyond. The partition walls were taken out to create spatial unity around a central kitchen, and a new wall with two sliding doors enables the bathroom and sleeping space to be separated.

Programme: Apartment
Location: Paris, France
Year: 2022
Team: in collaboration with Julie Richoz and Joschua Brunn
Photography: Simon Jüttner

Curated by Nicolaus Schafhausen, Miriam Zadoff and Juliane Bischoff, with graphic design by Boy Vereecken, this exhibition aimed to ‘open up a dialogue between contemporary art and the remembrance work performed by the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism’. Works by over 40 international artists were presented to ‘explore how to interpret the past and its links to the present day against the background of the historic exhibition’. Given the highly sensitive context of the artworks displayed, each had to be integrated into the design of the exhibition with the greatest of care in order to make sure that it could be appropriately contextualised, interacted with and respected. Since nothing could be fixed to any of the existing walls or ceilings, we developed a flexible clamping system for the objects that could be used throughout the show and made by simply adjusting readymade shelving brackets.

Programme: Exhibition
Location: Munich, Germany
Year: 2019–2020Team: Markus Stolz
Photography: Sebastian Schels and Simon Jüttner

Street, passage, courtyard. A small, simple and yet spatially rich house squeezed into a narrow urban slot not much more than six metres wide. Made from five load-bearing prefabricated panels and thick window frames that hide the internal walls from outside, the new street-facing facade seems to grab on to its neighbours. It is heavy and light, strong and weak at the same time.

The overall building consists of three units: a commercial space at ground floor level, a studio apartment on the first floor and a family dwelling above that. Given the limited size of the plot, a partly double-height passageway from which all units can be accessed creates unexpected generosity by opening up from the front of the building to a small courtyard at the rear, where the facade is, for the most part, fully glazed. This  outdoor space is enclosed by the walls of the neighbouring buildings.

Programme: Office, Studio, Apartment
Location: Munich, Germany
Year: 2021–2023
Team: Ludwig Marx, Carlo Grignani, Sonja Braunmüller and Jens Roll
Photography: Sebastian Schels and Florian Böhm

24 dwellings under one long roof. Parallel to the railway tracks and a road to the west of Oberau, the main building is sheltered from these infrastructural routes by a an even longer outbuilding, which consists of an open lean-to that rests up against a new wall designed to protect the residents from the noise. Continuous balconies, which are typical in the region, create generous outdoor spaces for every single apartment.

The block is built from solid brick, and has an insulated timber facade with wooden balconies. To meet the limited project budget without sacrificing any of the generosity of the proposed communal spaces, each detail was carefully and pragmatically designed. While it might resemble the traditional houses of the Garmisch-Partenkirchen area when glanced at from a distance, up close the building is evidently new, and makes use of contemporary construction techniques.

Programme: 24 Public Housing Units and Outbuildings
Location: Oberau, Germany
Year: 2019–2023
Team: Markus Stolz, Zeno Noichl and Jens Roll, in collaboration with Buero Dantele
Photography: Sebastian Schels and Simon Jüttner

Public housing on the urban fringe of a small village not far from Munich. The plot, which was once a parking lot and had a beautiful stock of mature trees, has been split up to form four residential buildings that form a quiet, central courtyard where the community of new residents can meet and rest away from the traffic on the adjacent road. All of the flats are accessed from east-facing exterior walkways, and all of the interior rooms are oriented westward towards the retained trees, which are overlooked by private balconies and terraces.

The exterior walkways, with their mirrored stairs, enable the extensive and rare use of bare, untreated timber, the use of which is typically restricted by fire safety regulations. Also, having foregone the construction of an underground parking garage, the only cement that was used was carefully limited to the foundation plinths for each of the four buildings, which bear the load of the timber-framed apartment blocks.

Programme: 21 Public Housing Units and Community Space
Location: Kranzberg, Germany
Year: 2018–2022
Team: Markus Stolz, Megi Davidtidze and Dong Hyun Kim, in collaboration with Buero Dantele
Photography: Sebastian Schels and Simon Jüttner

After the completion of T.I.A. House I, the plot next door caught our interest. It consisted of the hollowed-out remains of a similar type of house to the one we had just finished renovating, and it looked like a landfill site. But amid the rubble, a fig tree grew with poetic power. With our friend, the client, we started to speak about the neighbouring piece of land as our garden of paradise; the sort of cool, open space that is so hard to find in Almería nowadays but still plays a vital role in the bigger cities of Granada and Córdoba.

The client was convinced, and bought the plot. But once the purchase was completed, the idea of using it exclusively as a garden started to seem like a bit of a missed opportunity. A second, smaller house has been designed and is currently under construction along with the intended outdoor space, which now forms a link between the two properties. A external canopy needed to be built to accord with local building laws, and this has created a threshold space between the street, the garden and the new house.

Read the full story in ‘Buero Kofink Schels: In Practice’.

Programme: House and Garden
Location: Almería, Spain
Year: 2017–
Team: Markus Stolz, Megi Davidtidze and Carlo Grignani
Photography: Simon Jüttner

Low cost, not high tech! The sealed area of this house is small, and the indoor climate excellent. It’s a ‘smart home’ that lacks technical finesse; a ‘primitive’ house that is strikingly restrained in relation to its neighbours. Its expression seemingly identifies more with the sunburnt farm buildings next door than with its ‘classmates’ and so, quite unexpectedly, the house acts as a link in the patchwork carpet at the blurry edge of the village.

Programme: House
Location: Polling, Germany
Year: 2017–2019
Team: Niko Endres
Photography: Sebastian Schels and Simon Jüttner

When it was originally listed for sale, the price for this abandoned 1950s post office outbuilding included the cost of its demolition. Instead of scrapping it, however, the apparently worthless existing structure was kept and, after its sloping roof was removed, vertically extended to create the space needed to house a family of six. In order to create an organic, high-quality and affordable building, minimally-processed biodegradable materials were used, details were designed as simply as possible and the project was largely self-built.

Untreated fir wood and clay plaster form the main surfaces of the house’s interior, and the timber facade is painted with a sort of home-made paint comprised of linen oil and natural pigments. A shed was also built from the timber that was reclaimed from the building’s former roof, which had to be removed to facilitate the construction of the extension. In the garden, paving from the 1920s was uncovered below a tarmac surface.

Programme: House, Outbuilding and Garden
Location: Bad Hindelang, Germany
Year: 2017–2019
Photography: Simon Jüttner
Awards: Thomas Wechs Preis 2021, Wüstenrot Gestaltungspreis 2021, Anerkennung Baupreis Allgäu 2023

A selection of 12 co-operative housing projects from all around Europe, exhibited at the Pinakothek der Moderne. The show evidenced the processes of design development and construction for each scheme, along with their final built forms and the modes of communal living that they now sustain. The high partition walls for each project were designed to visually reference pinboards and thus participatory planning processes, and were selectively arranged in the exhibition space. Videos of the buildings in their typical everyday states of occupation were recorded especially for the exhibition by Jörg Koopman and framed on the front of the partitions. On the back each were plans, sketches and photos of the different projects. Models of some designs were distributed around the room on specially made trestles, and on the long interior wall of the museum texts were presented in the form of a participatory alphabet that referred to the processes of co-operative planning and living.

Programme: Exhibition
Location: Munich, Germany
Year: 2016
Team: In collaboration with Hilde Strobl, Andres Lepik and Jörg Koopmann
Photography: Sebastian Schels and Simon Jüttner

For this project, we got talking to the owner while travelling through France. He wanted to convert an old barn next to his holiday home; to turn it into an office, a 2CV workshop, a photo lab for his daughter and a library, complete with a stove and a large dining area. The barn, however, was not big. On top of that, the programme was complex, the budget was minimal and the distance between us was significant.
The various and overlapping challenges got us thinking, though. So we started first to design without a commission, then later travelled to Paris with a model to convince the client that this might even be possible. Acknowledging that we wouldn’t be able to spend a lot of time on site, as it was so far away, we tried to design as robustly as we possibly could to minimise the number of things that could go wrong.
One way to do this was to make an intervention that could be structurally independent of the existing building, the supporting oak frame of which is typical of this region of France. The concrete block walls, which had been added later, were also retained. Inside, the new workshop is a walk-in sculpture that does not touch the timber structure and allows the interior of the barn to be experienced in its entirety. Inside, on top of and around the sculpture, spatial zones of different characters are created to facilitate various uses.

Programme: Atelier and Workshop, Conversion
Location: Rueyres, France
Year: 2014–2015
Photography: Simon Jüttner
Awards: Bauweltpreis 2017, ‘Das erste Haus’

An inconspicuous courtyard house in the centre of Munich, situated between the university and the city’s main museums. The building was getting on a bit, and the client only really had the money to renew and refresh its surfaces. After taking a good look at it, though, it seemed that more could be achieved for the same budget. We therefore took a more holistic and structural approach to the house, and used targeted interventions to change its organisation in terms of both floor plan and section. To deliver on this potential and create a small townhouse on three spatially coherent levels, however, meant that the project had to be very economically efficient. Every intervention was carefully considered from the outset to preserve as much of the existing building as possible. The floorboards were repaired and repainted, for example, and used materials were repurposed throughout, with only simple wooden panels being used for fixed furniture. The result is a pure reflection of the need to do without common standards.

Programme: House, Conversion
Location: Munich, Germany
Year: 2016
Team: In collaboration with Maren Weitz
Photography: Sebastian Schels

A friend buys a house close to the city centre in Almería. It costs €15,000. He then buys five wooden windows that were on sale for almost the same amount, and asks us for friendly advice about where best to place them when vertically extending his new home. From here, we slowly but happily get entangled in a process of reactive design that continues to this day and has had a significant impact on how we perceive, think about and design architecture. The process became the project, and the project became the process.

Read the full story in Buero Kofink Schels: In Practice.

Programme: House
Location: Almería, Spain
Year: 2014–2016
Photography: Simon Jüttner

Urbanised landscapes are areas of abrupt contrasts, where spaces shaped by various conflicting logics are forced into coexistence but seldom interact. We think of these areas of superimposition as latent places, since it seems rare to find parts of the city that have a strong, coherent physical and civic presence that accurately corresponds to the complexity of the urban conditions they sustain. The consequence of this absence is a sequence or juxtaposition of ‘non-places’.
The site for this competition in Porto was just such a latent place, where diverse spatial elements and their histories came up against one another: an industrial ruin, a highway, a university and a neighbourhood with schools and daily amenities, as well as offices, infrastructural connections and zones for agricultural production. Amid this spectrum of spaces that operated both locally and regionally, we saw the potential to evoke a strong sense of place through design.
The Unknown Porto was an open international competition, and the first that we had entered to be judged by such a prominent jury, which was comprised of Eduardo Souto de Moura, Valerio Olgiati, Camilo Rebelo and Jonathan Sergison. There were three prizes overall, and our proposed project was awarded an Honourable Mention. Today, ten years later, we reflect on this moment as the beginning of Buero Kofink Schels.

Programme: Competition, Multi-Use
Location: Porto, Portugal
Year: 2014
Team:
Photography: