Aged in wood.

A small colony for elderly people adds sympathetically to a little town in the Black Forest. The aim is to create a community which is not cut off from the rest of society.

By the river Enz in the little town of Neuenburg, in the northern Black Forest, you will find four new buildings that at first are difficult to classify. Set out neatly in a row, they are rectangular in plan and have their short ends parallel to the river. The order allows them to pick up some of the grain of the village, where houses have traditionally turned their gables towards the bank to allow as many people as possible access to the water. The new tall, thin four-storey buildings, covered from ground to eaves in ship-lap timber boarding, have the workmanlike neatness and directness of the Functional Tradition. Their large external sliding shutters add to the impression and they appear from a distance to be perhaps barns of some sort, or mysterious and rather old-fashioned warehouses for country goods. Closer inspection reveals that they do in fact contain flats, and detailed examination shows that this is housing for the elderly.

In all, there are 28 habitations, 20 for one-person occupancy and the others for two people; areas range from 45[m.sup.2] for single flats to 53[m.sup.2] for double. The basic block arrangement is very simple: flats are arranged in pairs on each floor; upper levels are reached from elegant timber access galleries on the long north-east sides which are served by lifts and stairs; on the opposite side, generous balconies open to the sun. Individual flats are simple and quite small: they have a living area as the centre of activity; off this are the kitchen recess and the sleeping alcove (in many units, there are separate bedrooms). In the case of the easterly flats, there are fine views over the river, but the westerly ones are next to a steep bank and a road on to which only small peepholes peer out. One aim of the simple planning is to allow people as much freedom as possible to use their own furniture. Bathrooms and kitchens have been designed for use by handicapped people. The ground floor of the most southerly building has been designed as an old people's day centre and the ground floor of the next block in line has a caretaker's flat and an office for social workers.

Built into the competition programme was a requirement that the housing should make as much use of ambient energy as possible within the budget. The big sliding shutters are the most obvious external indication of this: they are drawn across at night in the winter and when people are away. Like the ship-lap boarding, they are of Douglas Fir, but are made of three layers of planks fixed flush.

The timber roofs are covered in transparent corrugated perspex sheets, which reveal timber construction below, and on the south-west pitches, these cover a strip of micro-bore solar collectors which provide enough heat to run the domestic hot-water system and make some contribution to room heating. The attics are uninsulated but ventilated and contain plant and storage spaces. The main bearing structure is of in-situ concrete insulated inside and out under the timber skin. So external walls have high insulation values and large thermal capacity, which tends to even out fluctuations in external temperature.

Time will tell how the little complex will work socially, but first indications suggest that it is popular and acts as a sub-community without being cut off from the town. Time will also change the buildings. The wood has been left without preservatives and it is already beginning to show signs of weathering to an elegant light silver-grey like, as the architects point out, 'old people's hair'. Their aim is not to make a caricature of the inhabitants but to show the dimension of time on the already dignified and appropriate little buildings.