Project design

The architect has made arrangements with the client to talk about some first design ideas.

Listen to the description of the preliminary design.

The main building is a rectangular, two-storey structure with a butterfly roof. A smaller rectangular one-storey structure protrudes at a right angle approximately a third of the way along the longer side of the larger element. From a bird’s eye view it looks like a T with differing lengths. The smaller element is a single-storey structure with a flat roof. There are no organic shapes or circles; the right angle prevails.

To be a little bit more precise: The main structure is almost 18m long and 6.50m wide. This will provide a living area of approximately 180m². The height of the building varies due to the slope of the site. At the top of the plot the main structure appears as a two-storey structure, so around 6m in height. At the southern end, 3 levels are visible adding up to around 9m. The smaller, single-storey structure protrudes at a 90° angle by about 7m.


Listen to the description again and try to picture the house from a bird’s eye view. Then describe the project you are working on at the moment or the building you live in.

Here’s a description of the Federal Art Museum in Bonn to practise the vocabulary introduced in this unit. Complete the text by choosing the correct translation of the German word.

The Federal Art Museum in Bonn, built by the Austrian architect Gustav Peichl in 1992, is a large (rechteckig), (zwei-geschossiges) building with three large (kegelförmig) skylights. Each one has a (Höhe) of (ungefähr) 9 m and a (Durchmesser) at the base of around 3.5 m. The (Spitze) of each skylight is made of glass.
There is a (Reihe) of 16 (Säulen), one each for each German federal state, next to the building. The (Säulen) are (hohle Zylinder) made of steel. They are 6 m tall and have a (Umfang) each of 2.1 m.

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