The first impression when exiting a train station is formative. While vehicles, sounds, smells and people overwhelm the newcomer, there are also silent actors in this great play: Buildings around the station are the first thing about the city a traveler beholds. “The House at the Station” should convey as much as possible about the city itself.
Hotels are entities that combine different aspects of the city within themselves. They are denser and more distinct than other buildings. Hotels represent the paradox of traveling: they are infused with a sense of nowhere while being stationary, offering the most intimate of domestic spaces – the bedroom - on the go and providing shelter in the face of the evenings uncertainty.
Topic of the diploma thesis was the design of a simple hotel at the newly emerging station square in Metz. The resulting “House at the Station” has strong ties to its complex and contrasting surroundings. Communicating with the apartment towers, office buildings and residential blocks, it has inherited the different ideas of the city in a single house. By virtue of its gesture the hotel takes on a balancing role within the fragile fabric of city morphology without wanting to fix anything in the sense of homogenizing it. The “House at the Station” seeks to restore a long lost relation without damaging the city's grown identity.