Resting hut by the creek
Built in the summer of 2020 as commissioned by the town.
Looking onto a pond, and sitting snugly in the shade of trees, this cozy hut invites you to rest and makes the otherwise unremarkable spot attractive.
Despite the location in the center of town, the patient observer can discover herons and kingfishers here.
The oaken timbers were spared a fate as firewood, the rafters in the reciprocal spiral roof come from local firs that didn't make it through the drought of 2018/19.
All the other wooden parts are from recycled palettes.
As in the other white buildings, the earthen plaster gets its white color from a casein-lime paint.
Passive-solar summer hut
With its wide, south-facing facade full of glass, this 320 square foot house catches the sun and stores its heat in the solid, foam glass-insulated earthen floor slab.
With its round backside, it ducks into the landscape to present as little surface as possible to the prevalent winds.
Together with the thick turf roof, these features create a heat buffer, a kind of stable "body heat" for the house, which - at least during the wine-growing region's long summer - guarantees cool days and mild nights.
Psychedelic tea house
This spacious, half-open pavillion was made for a small, Lower Saxony music festival. With its willow trunks and local clay as well as the recycled roof cladding from the barn on site, it probably has the highest portion of local materials.
Even the rocket stove, on which the tea is prepared during festival mode, is entirely made from materials from this very place.
Although built as a collective effort with much room for experimentation back in 2014, the building still withstands the elements of the rainy lowlands and is a favourite attraction of visitors big and small every summer.
Testing ground
On another small festival site, it all took its first steps in 2012:
To this day, the first and most experimental Urwerk building stands here. It appears truly exotic with its domed ceilings woven from willow and plastered in clay,
the plum, bubbly shapes, and its organically placed glass shard-windows.
A few steps to the right, we can see the bar for the forest restaurant, built in 2017, which serves as a food stall at the festival. So far, it's the only Urwerk building made without clay.
