Portfolio

From co-isolation to co-habitation

Bird's eye view of the project

Dwelling in the city of the 21st century requires a delicate balance between an inhabitant’s wish to retreat into privacy and his co-habitation with direct neighbours. When that balance is disturbed, as happens so often in socially disturbed neighbourhoods, what answer should the architecture of dwellings provide?

This project aspires to find middle ground, by rethinking the relationship between neighbours that live closely together. In urban apartments, interaction between neighbours is usually restrained to sounds and noises - negative disturbances of the private sphere. A natural reflex is to retreat even further into one’s private shell, sealing it off even more.

Modern mass housing has contributed to the ongoing and intensifying process delineating ever more precisely the border of the private cell. Technical developments conditioned air flows, insulation and sound barriers to stricter regulations and, consequently, less penetration. All this to ensure that influences from the outside reach us only insofar as we allow them to: the primary condition of an urban apartment, is that we ourselves decide what goes in, and what stays out. The mailbox, the telephone and the internet are shielded from strangers, screened off by locks and firewalls.

For people living in cities, the result is a seriously questionable situation. The privatization of the inner home deprives street- and community-life from its sustained core: interaction with neighbours. But is this really the only possible outcome? Or is there still a chance for society to enliven, for neighbours to connect again? And how (if at all) can architecture contribute to this situation? Those are the questions I set out to answer in this project.

Community business at ground level

Two practical challenges define the limits of the project from the outet: the presence of a roofed-in U-Bahn track to the south, and the site's current use as gathering place for informal meetings, celebrations and summer activities. Ateliers beneath the U-Bahn are rented out to artists, making this site a vibrant centre in an otherwise disturbed neighbourhood.

Transverse section

The dwellings

Transparency characterizes the dwellings in this project, though not at all cost. As guiding principle for the layout of all dwellings stands the requirement that inhabitants can, if they prefer so, have visual contact with their neighbours, but can also withdraw from this contact whenever they want. Instead of apartments that stand shoulder-to-shoulder, these dwellings establish a visual relationship with the dwellings to their side.

Each dwelling occupies two floors in the north layer, and one high living room in the south layer of the building

Each apartment crosses the internal corridor that provides access to them. The corridor splits each apartment in two halves: a layer to the south, and one to the north. On the latter are the private rooms, such as bed and bath rooms, but also reading rooms, providing ample space for families in their daily activities. The southern layer of the building contains a extra high living room, directly attached to the kitchen and the loggia's. The kitchens remain in the centre of the dwellings, as a pivot to private life, but also as the most important room to overview the internal corridors.

Each dwelling establishes multiple relations with its direct neighbours