The way we live together in urban environments has been drastically questioned through the past couple of years. The influence of the corona pandemic has dominated the way we live together. What’s always been an exception slowly manifested into the new norm and working from home quickly became the default. While the possibility was broadly seen as benefitial, the reality has revealed major downfalls.The need to stay home not only impacted and still impacts the way we work, it also impacts the way we are able to spend our freetime.
In this time of close to zero personal interaction with anyone outside of someones own household we had to face the challenges of isolation. Meeting up in a video call can not substitute interpersonal relationships. We are social beings with an inherit need of being together in person and do not strive for isolation. Translated into Space, one could argue that the single family home is the most isolated way to reside.Oddly enough, most people desire their own house, maybe because they want this form of isolation,
maybe because it is inherited in the understanding of adulthood. For a wide range of western population buying a nice house is still part of starting a family.
With our work, we want to challenge this dusty old believe that isolating us in single family homes is the prime way to reside if we strive to live our best lives, be happy and fulfilled. Rethinking how we want to live in the future communality is one of the core values we worked out to guide the design process.
Nowadays as a student of architecture, we inevitably get exposed to a wide range of concepts for sustainability. At the university, it holds a high priority in essays, research and design projects. Even outside of academia, it feels like common sense to choose options that are more sustainable in our everyday life. But what is truly sustainable? If we buy a wooden tooth brush just to notice later that It is made out of wood from the other side of the planet. Making the seemingly sustainable choice actually pretty bad in terms of its co2 footprint.The same phenomenon is true for buildings. It doesn’t end with choosing the materials with the least co2 emission in their creation process. In the course history of the build environment by V.-Prof. Dr. Kerstin Renz, we learned that the importance of a building for the people has an impact on its longevity. They keep the building in a good condition, even for hundreds of years. We can gain the insight from that, that a building has to keep relevant for the people and
therefore has to adopt to changing needs and want of its inhabitants. The longevity of a building has a significant impact on its sustainability. Mainly because of the grey energy that is stored in the building. This grey energy is the sum of all energy that was raised to build it. When a building is demolished, not only the grey energy is lost, more energy is used on top of that for demolishing and disposal. To ensure that the grey energy can still be used when the building has to be demolished, we can design and construct it in a way that it can be dismantled and its materials therefore reused. The Material itself is one of the more obvious factors of sustainability, but nonetheless can be one of the most complex design questions to solve. Prof. Dr. Lienhard talked about examples for that in his inaugural lecture, where he showed use cases of materials that usually should be avoided, but can be the best choice in specific situations. What can be generally said is that the more local the materials are, the better. Since most transportation is fueled by fossil fuels, any
unnecessary transport should be avoided, especially overseas.Wood takes a special role in the possibilities for building materials. It stores carbon dioxide and by using it for construction, stores it in the building. That can make a building carbon dioxide positive, storing more than it takes to build it.When the construction is done and the building is inhabited, it takes energy to run the building. It is to be desired, that the building can generate more than its needed energy sustainably and does not depend on outside sources. With that brief summary of sustainability in architecture, we gained an understanding for the need of specific solutions as well as some things that can be generalized and serve as a ruleset for every building project. For us, this ruleset is the following: Don’t demolish; Flexibility of use; Relevance for the people; Local materials whenever possible; The right material for the right situation, preferably wood; Think ahead so the building can someday be unmixed dismantled; Energy self-sufficient
We have a holistic approach to diversity in architecture, seeing it on multiple layers of the building and how it will be used. The first layer would be diversity of use and determines to avoid mono functionality. Especially downtown areas in cities like Hamburg are built examples for the need for diversification of use. We adopt this concept to different scales, aiming for diversity in the scale of a district,
to the scale of the building, to the scale of the floor, to the scale of a room. Freedom of use can only be achieved when spaces provide the necessary flexibility to be used differently and informal communication is induced by the differentiation of spaces that are close together. For us, diversity of users is the second layer and aims for diversification of age, ethnicity, social status and religion. Diversity
of space is the third layer and describes the need to differentiate in spacial situations that leads to variations of possible use cases. This also includes the relationship of the inside to the outside and aims towards their diverse integration into the building.
The harbour of Kassel is located close to the centre in the northeastern part of the city and is currently not perceived as part of it.
Our idea is to turn the harbour into a quarter, which becomes a new living part of the city and connects the centre with the district Bettenhausen.
The shown diagramm became a major reference point for the design of the spatial relationships inside the building and the fundamental concept for the expandability on an urban scale. A solid core that solves the infrastructural development and serves as the main load bearing structure. It combines multiple ideas in a simple sketch that we wanted to preserve in the final design.
