Super Future Collective Squeezes a Zigzag Aluminum Housing Block into a Nuremberg Backyard

On Fürther Street in Nuremberg, a construction gap in a backyard hemmed in on three sides by existing buildings is exactly the kind of leftover urban space most architects walk past. Super Future Collective, a five-person architecture collective, saw it differently. Their Backyard House, completed in 2022, slots a three-story, three-unit residential building into this residual plot and turns what could have been a claustrophobic courtyard condition into something genuinely livable.

What makes the project worth studying is not the mere fact of densification. It is the series of specific, interlocking decisions: a zigzag aluminum skin that bounces daylight deep into the courtyard, an external staircase whose landings double as terraces, and a repeating open plan clever enough to make 'compact' feel like a choice rather than a constraint. The building does not try to blend in. It announces itself, and the courtyard is brighter for it.

A Facade That Earns Its Strangeness

The ventilated facade of bare aluminum corrugated cladding reads differently depending on the angle and the light. From the street side, vertical ribbing gives the building a taut, almost industrial presence against the pitched roofs of its neighbors. Seen obliquely from the courtyard, the zigzag profile catches and scatters light in a way that flat plaster never could. The reflective, pale surface was chosen deliberately: in a north-facing, tightly enclosed site, every lumen bounced back into the shared courtyard counts.

This is not decoration. The light color and angular geometry of the cladding are doing real environmental work, compensating for an orientation that would otherwise condemn the ground-floor apartments to perpetual dimness. The building sets itself apart from its brick-and-render context and, in doing so, improves the microclimate for all the residents who share the yard.

Green Metal as a Unifying Thread

A signature green appears everywhere: perforated balcony screens, stair balustrades, handrails, kitchen cabinetry, even bathroom tiles. In a project this materially restrained (concrete, aluminum, timber), the green functions almost like a wayfinding system, marking the points where residents touch the building. The perforated metal panels filter views from the stair landings without closing them off, maintaining visual contact with the courtyard while providing a degree of privacy.

The detailing at the stair balustrades deserves a closer look. Gridded mesh panels meet diagonal cable stays and concrete soffits with a precision that suggests careful coordination between the prefabricated stair elements and the in-situ structure. Nothing looks forced. The green reads as confident rather than trendy, a deliberate contrast to the neutral aluminum and raw concrete that dominate the palette.

The External Staircase as Social Infrastructure

Pulling the staircase out of the building envelope was a critical move. It frees up interior floor area for living space and eliminates the dark internal corridor that plagues most small apartment buildings. More importantly, the deep landings at each level become usable outdoor rooms. At the balcony level, a yellow bistro table and chairs sit beneath an exposed concrete ceiling, framed by green perforated railings. It is a proper terrace, not a gesture.

These landings also provide something harder to quantify: casual visual connection. Residents on different floors share sightlines to the courtyard and to each other. In a building with only three units, this kind of incidental social contact matters. The staircase becomes the building's most communal space, a threshold between the private apartment and the shared courtyard below.

One Plan, Three Ways to Live

All three apartments share an identical floor plan, organized around a single large room divided by a rear core containing the bathroom, dressing area, and storage. The sleeping zone can be screened off with a curtain, which means the living and dining area feels substantially larger than it is when the curtain is open. This is a well-worn strategy, but the execution here is careful: the kitchen cabinetry in pale green lines the courtyard wall, and a long built-in timber bench runs beneath the window, offering storage drawers and a daybed-like perch overlooking the rooftops.

That window bench deserves particular credit. It solves several problems at once: additional seating for the dining area, concealed storage in a compact apartment, and a place to sit and read in what is clearly the best light in the room. The view out to neighboring clay-tile rooftops, framed by the deep window reveal, gives each unit an unexpected sense of context and calm.

Material Honesty in Tight Quarters

The material choices are restrained but not austere. Polished concrete floors, white vertical ribbed wall panels, and exposed concrete ceilings form the backdrop. The recessed entrance pairs corrugated aluminum with a green perforated panel, establishing the building's material identity at the threshold. Inside the bathrooms, pale blue square tiles surround the fixtures, introducing just enough warmth to keep the spaces from feeling institutional.

The high-hole brick construction behind the ventilated facade provides solid thermal mass, while the prefabricated ceiling and stair elements kept the build tight on a constrained site where staging space was essentially nonexistent. Beneath it all, micro-bored pile foundations navigate war-era fill material in the subsoil: a reminder that building in the middle of a European city always means building on top of history, literally.

Facade Texture and Light

Close-up, the vertical slat facade reveals itself as more than a rain screen. Diagonal shadow lines cut across the ribbed surface as the sun moves, producing a constantly shifting pattern that animates what is otherwise a flat plane. The angular meeting point of ceiling and wall panels creates subtle geometry in diffused light. These are details that reward proximity, something residents will notice daily even if visitors never do.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan makes the constraint legible: the red-highlighted footprint sits deep within a block, accessible only through the gap between existing street-front buildings. The floor plan confirms the efficiency of the open layout, with the kitchen and living zone flowing uninterrupted toward a planted terrace. In section, the floor-to-ceiling glazing and the curtain partition are visible, as is the relationship between the built-in cabinetry and the generous window openings. The elevation drawing, placing the three-story volume beside a taller pitched-roof neighbor, makes the scalar modesty of the intervention clear. This is not a grand architectural statement. It is a precise insertion.

Why This Project Matters

European cities are full of gaps like this one: backyard plots, leftover lots, spaces between party walls that seem too small or too awkward to build on. The Backyard House proves that these sites are not merely viable but capable of producing housing that is spatially generous, materially honest, and socially engaged. The shared courtyard, the staircase terraces, and the reflective facade all work together to make the dense urban fabric around them function better, not just for the new residents but for the existing ones.

Super Future Collective's approach here is not revolutionary in any single gesture. It is revolutionary in the accumulation of smart, specific decisions: prefabricated elements for a site with no laydown area, a light-colored skin to compensate for north-facing orientation, an external stair that gives back more than it takes. If cities are serious about densification without displacement, this is the scale and the attitude that will actually deliver it.

Backyard House by Super Future Collective, Fürther Street, Nuremberg, Germany. Completed 2022. Photography by Kim Fohmann.

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