Haus Baden bei Wien is a minimalist home located near Vienna, Austria designed by Balissat Kaçani in collaboration with Jann Erhard. The dwelling, positioned on a narrow strip between tramway infrastructure and a walled garden, represents a profound meditation on architectural intervention. The building doesn’t simply occupy its site; it actively transforms the relationship between public transit and private sanctuary. Where most contemporary houses seek to establish clear boundaries, this design embraces ambiguity as its organizing principle.
The material strategy reveals the architect’s commitment to what might be called “honest construction.” The 55-centimeter-thick exterior walls of insulating concrete appear almost medieval in their mass, yet serve thoroughly modern purposes. This monolithic approach – where interior and exterior share the same material reality – challenges the layered complexity that dominates contemporary building practice. The thermal mass becomes the house itself, pipes embedded directly into floor slabs without additional surface treatments, creating what the architects describe as “a thermally activated mass.”
This construction method connects to a rich tradition of concrete experimentation that emerged in post-war European architecture. Yet where brutalist precedents often emphasized monumentality, this house uses mass to create intimacy. The thick walls don’t fortress the inhabitants away from their surroundings; instead, they create a buffer zone that allows for selective engagement with both garden and infrastructure.
The interior spatial organization defies conventional domestic logic through its double-helix staircase system. Six identical rooms, each oriented toward the tracks, gain their distinct character not through variation in size or proportion, but through their relationships to one another. The twisted staircases create what the architects call “different heights for these otherwise identical spaces,” generating a house that must be experienced in fragments while always being perceived as a whole.
