Eight monolithic blocks define five spaces, hosting two coexisting functions: an office on the ground floor, reversible into an independent apartment, and a duplex on the upper levels.

Within these eight blocks are integrated all essential elements: vertical circulation, technical systems, domestic appliances, and sanitary equipment.

The systemic design enabled complete prefabrication in massive wood but also in skeleton construction, transport in a single delivery, and on-site assembly in just 48 hours.

After several unsuccessful attempts to obtain a municipal building permit, inspiration emerged during a site visit to another project. There, the stacked concrete counterweights of a high crane revealed a model of simplicity, rationality, and systemic logic—yet also carried a certain poetry in their monolithic presence. 

This gesture of stacking volumes, and the voids it generated, became a spatial concept that we reinterpreted as a framework for contemporary domesticity.

 The project references Oswald Mathias Ungers’ Haus ohne Eigenschaften (House Without Qualities), an experimental reduction of architecture to its most essential elements and a materialization of his long-standing research on abstraction.

In the FPH, this spatial concept evolves into both a constructive principle and an organizational guideline: a functional ground floor—adaptable into an independent apartment—supports a duplex above, staging an urban living experience within the fabric of suburbia.

True to the ethos of the Haus ohne Eigenschaften, Ungers’ radical experiment in architectural reduction, and confronted with the expressive yet immovably conservative grammar of the suburban landscape, the house assumes a no-nonsense position. It does not resist convention; it assimilates it. By adopting the banal standards of local building economics almost like camouflage, it inserts itself into suburbia by becoming materially indistinguishable from it. 

This apparent neutrality is strategic. Behind the camouflage lies an internal order of almost obsessive rigor: a spatial logic in which every function is organized with precision, every void calibrated, every volume stacked with purpose. The tectonic expression follows the same reductionist drive—pursuing the elimination of all unnecessary elements, erasing lines until nothing superfluous remains.

The result is a paradox: a house that blends into its surroundings by appearing ordinary and dull, yet that operates as a laboratory of abstraction. Suburbia absorbs it without resistance, while it quietly stages an alternative model of domesticity: adaptable, systemic, reduced to essentials, and yet endowed with a strange and compelling intensity.

Images by Ludmilla Cerveny and David Laurent