Fido Spröde House

Any house saved from de­mo­li­tion offers a small glimmer of hope given the current state of the planet’s climate. Some build­ings do not, at first glance, suggest re­de­vel­op­ing or re­pur­pos­ing them would make much sense. But the urgency of the sit­u­a­tion married to a desire to value and not squan­der the energy in­her­ent in any build­ing is in­creas­ingly causing clients and ar­chi­tects to look into the matter a little more at­ten­tively. As was the case with the ar­chi­tect Thomas Schmidt of the SSP prac­tice, who fell in love with a di­lap­i­dated de­tached house in south Dort­mund in the 1950s.

The SSP ar­chi­tects’ prac­tice launched the Grey­toGreen® label in 2019 as a guide to de­vel­op­ing sus­tain­able ar­chi­tec­ture. In the present case, too, the ar­chi­tects found a way of adapt­ing the house’s res­i­den­tial cre­den­tials to current stan­dards without being unduly in­va­sive in ac­cor­dance with the prin­ci­ples un­der­pin­ning the label. The ma­te­ri­als orig­i­nally used, for in­stance, were re­tained or re-used wher­ever pos­si­ble; in short, what­ever was already in place was treated with respect.

The build­ing is a typical post-war hous­ing-es­tate unit and as such is utterly un­am­bi­tious in its struc­tur­ing and ba­si­cally re­it­er­ates the ear­li­est shape ever given to a house. On closer perusal, however, its straight­for­ward ar­chi­tec­ture is seen to have been well thought through. Its clear out­lines, for in­stance, prove suit­able for any makeover desired. Knock­ing down two walls and re­mov­ing three doors on the ground floor gave rise to an open-plan spatial layout ex­tend­ing from east to west in the house and allows the garden to be ex­pe­ri­enced in a new way in the process. All ex­ist­ing ma­te­ri­als were ex­am­ined by the ar­chi­tects with a view to es­tab­lish­ing whether they could be re­tained. Logical as that may sound, it is far from self-ev­i­dent.

Besides the house’s ceramic roof tiles and tile-and-stone façade, it was also pos­si­ble to pre­serve the timber windows and ra­di­a­tor sur­rounds orig­i­nally fitted. The only visible al­ter­ation made to the build­ing’s ex­ter­nal ap­pear­ance is the matt-black lining of folded sheet metal that now en­closes the draught ex­cluder and pre­sents itself as a ma­te­r­ial for a new age. The ar­chi­tects felt that, despite con­sciously echoing the ar­chi­tec­ture of the1950s, the FSB 1023 handle model se­lected is nonethe­less softly spoken. It is tai­lor-made for users, they say, in both tech­ni­cal and func­tional terms. Door pulls in Silver An­odised Alu­minium create a gentle sense of con­trast with the colour of the doors.

The window handles, on the other hand, were fitted in Black Alu­minium and hardly stand out against their host windows. There’s going to be a partial refit before very long, however: all the window handles are being re­placed with FSB 1226 in Silver An­odised Alu­minium, whilst the 1023 fit­tings on doors are being re­tained. This will see the 1950s-look FSB 1023 model com­bined under a single roof with FSB 1226, whose at­trac­tively varied styling and clean-lined moder­nity un­der­score just how suc­cess­fully the Spröde house has been brought into the present age. SSP’s canny ar­chi­tec­tural han­dling of the Fido Spröde house was ho­n­oured in 2022 at the in­ter­na­tional Houses Award that pub­lish­ers G+J and the Fed­er­a­tion of German Ar­chi­tects (BDA) run to­gether.