BIQ – The Clever Treefrog

This visionary “Case Study House” featuring the first algae bioreactor façade world-wide was realized in the frame of the International Building Exhibition (IBA) in Hamburg in 2012 and 2013. As a “Smart Material House”, it combines intelligent materials and technologies with new typologies of living.

Architectural masterpiece
Setting the scene with its two red-white-red-white striped sunny-sided algae bioreactor façades, this janiform structure is reminiscent of the colours associated with the Free and Hanseatic city of Hamburg, or if you like, with the Alpine Republic of Austria – but above all – they emphasize the uniqueness of this multi-storey residential building and its prototypical method of producing energy and regulating light and sun-shading. At close range, the façades – oscillating from afar through the constantly growing algae – start to move; bubbles forming through the supply of carbon dioxide and nitrogen, as well as the permanently essential circulation of water containing aerosol-like microalgae, seem to suggest that biomass production could be a solar-powered art installation, steadily bubbling along.
From afar, you can already read two giant speech bubbles with black letters against a white background shown on the two green shady façades with their tiny windows, the first bubble asking “Photosynthesis?” and the second replying “Cool!”. “Realisation also means communication”, SPLITTERWERK engineers, architects and artists assert and let the top of two penthouse façades entwine with grape-vine ornaments.

Residential typology
Whether it be Mies van der Rohe’s flowing space, Frank Lloyd Wright’s open floor plan, or Adolf Loos’s “Raumplan”, not to mention Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s economical Frankfurt Kitchen – their contemporary development is incorporated in the intelligent residential typologies of the “Case Study House” Clever Treefrog. In the adjustable structure of these new residential typologies, functional spaces can be alternately or simultaneously attached or detached on demand. The Loos plan thus becomes an individual and time-oriented living plan. The appearance of living space is dominated by user-oriented living requirements and changes of programme. Accordingly, “Smart Spaces” develop from the “Hamburg apartment” and “Milan apartment” with different typologies of re-configurable floor plans.

High efficient façade

Biomass heating systems

Ground Source Heat Pump