To develop an individual concept for each task and each property without committing oneself to a specific material or a form – that is how the architect and town planner Peter Fink describes the way of working of the architectural office mühlich, fink & partner in Ulm, which he has led since 1993 together with Professor Dr. Wolfgang Mühlich and Dr. Christine Mühlich-von Staden. This attitude produces individual, striking and frequently unusual buildings, which do not orientate themselves to the general and the usual.

A detached house, for example, counters the evening sun with its windowless west front or a cubic passive house refuses to take on a typical eco-look with its cubature and Corten steel facade.

However, detached houses form only a small part of their portfolio. The range of the buildings they have realised extends from development hall to school buildings, from the redevelopment of an old municipal swimming pool, including conversion to a school of music, to inexpensive terraced houses, from open space design in the inner city to the conversions of hospitals. A variety which the architects do not want to do without. According to Fink, there have been phases in which specialisation would have been an obvious option. "But we made a conscious decision against that, because we want to work on a broad spectrum of interesting tasks." This also includes not only working separately on a few performance phases, but also remaining generalists, for reasons of quality assurance alone.

mühlich, fink & partner acquire the majority of their commissions via competitions – also a kind of quality assurance. "I am not a sportsman, but I would compare an architectural competition with a sporting discipline", states Fink clearly. "You go out onto the field as a team and perform as well as you can at this point in time and within a limited period of time. In a competition you constantly have to make new offers to the clients and organisers and you are thereby competing." Therefore, even after the tenth school built, one is never tempted to say: I already know how to do it beforehand. Fink is convinced: "If you constantly face this sporting discipline, then a certain measure of success sets in." You grow with each task, you learn to analyse the speci- fications precisely, to develop a concept within a short time and to convey that concept simply, concisely and understandably. The fact that mühlich, fink & partner are successful with this constant training is shown not only by the numerous competitions they have won, but also by the buildings they have realised, for which they have received numerous awards and honours.

The new building of the Academy of Communication arose out of one of the competitions that they won: A two to sevenstorey building in dyed fair-faced concrete in an urbanistically dominant place in Ulm. Coming from Neu-Ulm it marks the southern entrance to the city and increases the value of the area border along the Danube. In addition it forms the conclusion and the last component of a former army barracks site. The internal structure is, like most of the architects' buildings, arranged clearly, logically and functionally: The corridors are situated on the facade toward the busy Bismarckring, while the classrooms are lined up on the other side, toward Ulm Minster. The facade is sharp edged and reduced, neither covers at the parapet nor window sills disturb the sculptural organisation. Among other things, these requirements determined the choice of material: fair-faced concrete. Its dyeing, in a brownish earth hue, is meant as homage to the existing buildings in the district with their external walls plastered in warm hues. The façade was manufactured using a planed, brushed and pre-pigmented board shuttering. mühlich, fink & partner worked with dyed fair-faced concrete for the first time in this project. When the subject is broached with Fink, he begins to sing the praises of the contractors: of the tradesmen, who concreted sharp-edged corners during the winter months in two shifts at a height of 26 metres, and of their superiors, who were prepared during the planning phase to produce numerous samples in the most diverse variants. Fink himself was in demand in this process above all as a communicator and moderator, as the one who had to inform everyone involved about his quality criteria and the reasons for them. For Fink, this is one of the architect's central tasks. That which cannot be conveyed also cannot be implemented, neither in finding the colour nor in the execution. "If the tradesman doesn't know why I want to have the fair-faced concrete sharp edged, for example, then he also has no desire to implement it that way", says Fink.

The consultancy has continuously used fair-faced concrete without the addition of pigments in the most diverse variants in its buildings, whether as a box-shaped balcony construction at the front of an apartment house or as a contrasting material in the conversion of the old municipal swimming baths into a school of music. One of the most striking fairfaced concrete projects is Fink's private house. An elongated fair-faced concrete structure with a flat roof that was completed in 1998. To the south, the ground floor of the house offers five spatial axes of 3.45 metres each with group and individual rooms, which are generously extended into the garden by a deep terrace made of larch wood planks. A space with kitchen and auxiliary rooms is located on the north side of the ground floor in a projecting part of the building with delicate larch wood boarding, which at the same time roofs over the parking spaces below it. There are further individual rooms in the basement. The design of the house is determined by the reduced material variety, differentiated room heights and extensive lighting areas, even via the roof. Fair-faced concrete was used here as well, in order to create a monolithic sculpture and to avoid seams as well as slab joints. "Perhaps it is the desire to approach the design like a sculpture", admits Fink. The west side of the building also bears testimony to this, where Fink dispensed entirely with windows. Only the entrance door is set like a hatch in the almost square wall, but doesn't reach down to the ground. The proportions of the door and wall are carefully matched to one another. Fine design features such as these are important to Fink; his enthusiasm for the west façade has still not diminished even after twelve years. Despite its closed execution, Fink does not have to do without the evening sun; this enters the house via the roof glazing.

Buildings by mühlich, fink & partner are precisely planned and executed down to the smallest detail. Their aesthetic sophistication and their concept cannot be diluted by allegedly simple solutions such as standard formats, regardless of the material. In the case of the detached passive house in Ulm, the window openings dictate the dimensions of the Corten steel plates, not the productionrelated sizes. In order to avoid visible screw or rivet fastenings, the plates were glued. Due to the depth of overhang of the sub-construction and the individual weight of the plates, this was a technical challenge that required new developments. Critical analysis additionally determines the consultancy's attitude towards design. Do ecological buildings always have to be recognisable by their 'eco-look', or shouldn't energy efficiency long since be a matter of course in every new building? For the consultancy, architecture means uniting all of the constantly growing energetic and technical requirements and the resulting constantly developing individual living and quality desires by the conception of proportion, light, material, surface and colour in each individual situation and, hence, to create sensuality and atmosphere. Technical requirements are for them nothing more than the potential for aesthetic solutions.

"If it's about fair-faced concrete, then there's nothing I find more exciting than monolithically poured concrete", states Fink clearly. The production of in-situ concrete is craftsmanship. "What fascinates me is the result; how it comes out after demoulding. Smoothing over the concrete because it's not 100% perfect is out of question. It should remain pure and be allowed to age with dignity." The decisive advantage of fair-faced concrete for him, however, is the possibility to realise sculptural, reduced buildings. Insulating concrete offers an enticing outlook here. Fink is quite sure that "when we get to the point where insulating concrete meets the continually growing demands on insulation values with its characteristics and is also offered at acceptable prices, then the material will no doubt meet with broad desire." "There is nothing more fascinating, when one approaches concrete, than to imagine the sculpture in such a way that it is a single-shell wall and I can really experience the material quite purely inside and out."

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Architekten Mühlich, Fink & Partner

Heimstraße 11

D-89073 Ulm – Germany

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