Alexander Brenner

There will be few architects in Europe who have addressed the villa as a type as consistently and with such formal awareness as the Stuttgart architect Alexander Brenner. Brenner has run his own practice in his home city of Stuttgart since 1990, and within a single decade created a series of villas responding individually to the urban situation and the owners' needs; they are incomparable in their formal language and also in their interior coherence.

Brenner's villas can be seen and experienced as three-dimensional works of art, lucid sculptures to live in, horoughly modelled down to the last detail. The geometrical sculptural effect is achieved outside by the horizontals and verticals of their architectural structure and bands of windows, used to powerful graphic effect, by the thrusting canopy roofs, the cubically effective white walls pushing into the rooms individually, and by their large expanses of glazed façades.

They also stand up energetically to the organically designed gardens and other outdoor spaces. But what is completely unique is the design logic brenner deploys to make the cubism of the external forms impact on the interior, applying it to the everyday utility objects in the living rooms, kitchen and bathroom. Amazingly, he makes it look completely natural that not only all the cupboards in these houses are adapted to the stereometric order of the spatial continuum's subtle rhythms, but so are all objects of everyday life.

So if there has ever been a stuttgart style in the history of more recent architecture, as is so often asserted, then that style has achieved a new and functionally highly refined liveliness in Brenner's houses.

The book was published 2011 at Callwey