Two buildings that engage in a dialogue
The competition-winning design by EM2N for building plots B and F consists firstly of the apartment house ‘Emil’, a central hub for the new quarter on the WIFAG site in the north of Bern. With its solid corners and semi-recessed balconies, this building makes a powerful yet delicate statement. The two-story café in the plinth helps to animate the street space outside, while the studios bring life to the residential courtyard. Wherever possible the apartments extend around a corner and have a flexible layout that facilitates adaptations in the long term. The building is constructed with a lightweight wood and concrete frame and the internal walls are not loadbearing, allowing the layout of the flats to be replanned when and if required. The second apartment block ‘Fritz’, which occupies plot F, offers a contrast; it forms part of a subtly articulated row of buildings with recessed upper floors and precisely defined strip windows that lend the large volumes a dynamic quality and refer to the internal organization of the apartments; space-defining downstand beams structure a delicately graduated spatial continuum, which, thanks to a flexible structural system that combines timber construction with concrete bracing at points, allows a variety of floor plans, ranging from high-ceiling flats at ground floor level that extend from the front to back of the building to smaller units with corner balconies on the recessed upper floors.
