With a design assignment in a cultural-historical context, the office always focusses on the search for the specific character or the "genius loci" of a place. This specific character loci can then form the basis for starting a new development.
In other words, the spatial environment is studied for its most essential characteristics, in order to arrive at the intelligent "move", which can strengthen these characteristics and add new qualities for the benefit of the future. The aim is to combine preserving and restoring cultural-historical qualities and structures and adding landscape and architectural elements inspired by them; to reach a balanced balance between conservation and renewal.
In other words, the spatial environment is studied for its most essential characteristics, in order to arrive at the intelligent "move", which can strengthen these characteristics and add new qualities for the benefit of the future.
The vision of the office with regard to intervening in an urban or landscape situation with important cultural-historical values, is primarily supported by the belief in "simultaneity"; the simultaneity of past and present, which is the spatial quality par excellence. After all, the old is not over and in the meantime the future is already part of current events; of the present. Making the individual time layers readable at the same time expresses this. Modernity in the sense of "a break with history" does not fit into such an approach. The aim is precisely to heal and make the historical stratification and continuity of the developmental history of a place livable.
Such integration into the continuity of development history does not exclude contemporary design and the application of contemporary techniques and materials. Architectural and landscape structures and elements with a certain degree of timelessness; contemporary and invisible presence are the goal.
Design and materialization should initially look for references in the identity of a place. Not historicizing, but indebted to the past.
As far as the office is concerned, this provides a design that does justice to the cultural-historical qualities of a place, but which is also sustainable; it provides a design that is "time-stable" and "time-resistant".