Haus Claude enters Untergiesing not as an object seeking spectacle, but as an urban figure intent on listening.
At Claude-Lorrain-Straße 19, close to the Isar and the everyday rituals of Munich’s south, the project by su und z Architekten proposes a form of residential architecture that is less concerned with novelty than with continuity. Its ambition lies in calibration: how to build with presence, without interrupting the fragile texture of a grown neighbourhood.

The building’s most eloquent gesture is its façade. The modern shingle skin, pale and finely articulated, gives the volume a tactile depth that resists the smooth anonymity of much contemporary housing. It reads almost like clothing: protective, structured, and close to the body of the city. This surface is not nostalgic, yet it carries memory. It translates the material character of the quarter into a contemporary architectural language, allowing the new building to appear both composed and familiar.

Behind this controlled exterior, Haus Claude accommodates 57 apartments, ranging from compact urban homes to generous family residences and penthouses. Each unit is given an exterior counterpart — balcony, loggia or roof terrace — so that domestic life is not sealed off from climate, street and garden. The project’s green courtyard, inspired by the nearby Isarauen, becomes more than an amenity. It is the interior landscape of the ensemble, a quiet counterpoint to the city, where the promise of density is softened by planting, shade and shared atmosphere.

The revitalised courtyard house for workspaces adds another layer to the composition. Rather than treating housing as an isolated product, Haus Claude accepts the mixed rhythms of the city: living, working, arriving, leaving. Its mobility concept — bicycle parking, repair station, car and cargo-bike sharing, and electric-ready underground parking — suggests an urban domesticity increasingly defined by flexibility rather than ownership.