BÜRO MÜHLBAUER’s concrete dwelling in the Bavarian Forest in Germany reimagines domestic life around two inward-looking courtyards, privileging perception and ritual over outward display.
The “House with two courtyards” resists the pastoral clichés often projected onto its region; instead, it establishes a self-contained topography where light, weather, and ritual unfold in a controlled interior world.
The project describes itself as “built without context,” a provocation that is legible in its continuous, opaque perimeter. Rather than acknowledge its surroundings through transparency or gesture, the house withholds them. Its outer edge becomes a concrete membrane, directing attention inward to the two courts. Here, the Bavarian climate is reinterpreted in architectural terms: shifting temperatures, shadows, and breezes are encountered as spatial events, measured not by landscape but by enclosure.
Against this reticence, a single view interrupts the silence. From the fireplace room, a deliberate aperture frames the distant mountain horizon. The gesture is precise, almost surgical, a refusal of panorama in favor of calibration. It turns a ritual of gathering around fire into an encounter with a single datum of the wider landscape, underscoring the building’s disciplinary stance: outlook is not a given, but a controlled act.
The dual-courtyard plan produces a clear hierarchy. The larger court hosts collective life, mediating seasonal shifts and public use, while the smaller, sheltered court serves the bedrooms and intimate quarters. These voids structure the plan as much as they modulate climate. Circulation is drawn through them, forcing inhabitants to register thresholds of light, sound, and temperature. Within, sightlines cross courts and rooms in layered sequences, offering visual depth without surrendering privacy.
Materially, the house pursues a monolithic clarity. Cast entirely in concrete, its expression rests not on ornament but on thickness, proportion, and mass. Deeply recessed openings register the weight of the envelope, while the thermal properties of concrete reinforce the courts’ microclimatic performance. Interiors are sparse but nuanced, with shifting light and shadow articulating the architecture more vividly than any applied surface could. Externally, weather leaves its trace in patina, allowing time itself to become the house’s ornament.
The courtyards, together with a third non-occupiable garden, are not conceived as places of leisure but as instruments of perception. They stage the passing of clouds, the play of low winter sun, and the accumulation of snow, making landscape less a terrain to traverse than an image to inhabit. In this sense, the house frames living as a cultural act of looking, its architecture stripping away distraction in order to concentrate attention on elemental conditions—light, air, shadow, and the measured horizon.
What emerges is a work of striking restraint, a domestic architecture that redefines its site by retreating from it. By privileging interior courts over external engagement, BÜRO MÜHLBAUER has composed a house that insists on perception as the true measure of place.
