The surviving stone walls of a former barn in Brandenburg in Germany, become the foundation for Add-On Project, a studio house by Brandlhuber+ and Muck Petzet Architekten on land protected as a ground monument.
The project text opens with a question: "What if the remains of a building were not a constraint, but the starting point for something new?" In Drense, in the Uckermark, the remains are those of a former barn. Its massive natural stone walls are the only part still standing; the large pitched roof they once carried is gone. On its project page, Brandlhuber+ names a team of Arno Brandlhuber with Olaf Grawert, Jonas Janke and Moritz Heuberger, a private client, and two uses for the studio house that stands there now: living and working.
The site sets two conditions that seem to contradict each other. Above ground stand the walls. Below ground lie archaeological traces of what may have been a Slavic settlement, and they place the property under protection as a ground monument, a Bodendenkmal. Digging is tightly restricted, which makes building the usual way difficult. The two offices start instead from what is already there: the walls that once held up the barn roof now serve as the base of the new house.
The new roof brings back the barn's old silhouette and encloses an upper floor with no extra supporting columns. Its geometry answers to the neighbouring buildings and to local planning rules. Setbacks in the new volume leave two courtyards within the old perimeter, between the stone and the house, and each becomes a sheltered garden.
The interior is shaped largely by light. Circular openings in the roof take in the morning and evening sun and send daylight down to the ground floor and the courtyards. The rooms open onto the gardens through glass façades, while the old stone walls run on through the house, so the barn's original openings and its material presence remain. The ground and upper floors do not depend on each other structurally, which lets either be refitted for other needs without overhauling the building. Smaller additions carry the project out into the landscape, where a solar tree and a rainwater collector tie energy and water into the old structure.
The name Add-On describes the method here. The past is neither reconstructed nor erased, only added to, and the old building stays present while new uses open up around it. "The result is not a restored barn or an entirely new house," as the project's own description puts it. The stone stays where it stood, and the house sits on top of it.
