In Baden bei Wien, Austria, Balissat Kaçani + Jann Erhard craft a monolithic house of concrete and enigma, folding infrastructure, garden, and dwelling into one hauntingly silent entity.
Tucked behind a stately villa and hemmed in by the Baden railway, the house asserts itself at the end of a private, tree-lined path — not with flamboyance, but with the gravitas of mass and silence. It is both buried and exposed, introverted yet unmissable, a built negotiation between nature, infrastructure, and historical residue.
The structure itself is a study in intentional reduction. A 55 cm-thick wall of insulating concrete wraps the house, unapologetically raw and uniform — the same inside and out. There are no layers to conceal, no decorative gestures. Its archaic, almost brutalist clarity is balanced by a quietly radical performance: the building is thermally activated, the heating and cooling systems embedded directly within its floor slabs, allowing the house to breathe and regulate temperature through its very bones.
But the project’s conceptual engine is the relationship between the house and the garden. A folding wall blurs the boundary between enclosure and entry, drawing the visitor into a space that is neither entirely interior nor exterior. At once void and volume, this garden room — over ten meters high, just over three wide — splits the house in two and serves as both threshold and anchor. It’s a sculptural absence that amplifies the house’s spatial drama.
From this cavernous atrium rise two staircases — a spatial double helix — that twist and separate the house into discrete realms. Each serves its own micro-territory of rooms, stacked along the railway side, all identical in plan yet varied in height. This slight modulation — created by the offset stair rhythms — gives an unexpected sense of nuance, turning repetition into variation. The result is a fragmented but deeply considered sequence of spaces that remain perceptually distant, despite physical proximity.
These rooms, like the house itself, resist definition. With fixed northern windows and doors tucked away from the tracks’ clamor, they invite use but do not prescribe it. The architecture’s neutrality is not a blankness, but a kind of open-ended script, adaptable to lives that haven’t yet materialized. In its mute mass and enigmatic form, the house poses a quietly subversive question: what does it mean to live fully, even as architecture recedes from certainty?
