While studying contemporary urban housing in Europe, in relation with the profound changes that have characterized the last part of the twentieth century, emerges the need to investigate the new strategies used by architects all over the continent to face new lifestyles and new demands. By analyzing more than 150 urban housing projects, built in the last fifteen years in European cities, this research is trying to define a grid of themes which seem to persist in different conditions. These characters represent the synthesis between lifestyle changes, permanence of dwelling forms and the research traditions of architecture.
Russian Dolls
A first issue concerns the social interaction present inside the new urban housing projects: while we may consider over passed the character of close community and social control typical of pre-modern neighborhood, to be obsolete, late-modern cities strong anonymity and standardization of life are equally outdated. It is therefore a new purpose to seek a delicate balance where the project preserves and promotes the proper degree of socialization without affecting the privacy of inhabitants.
“For architects and urban designers, the complementary task is to create urban fabric that provides opportunities for social groups to intersect and overlap rather than remain isolated by distance or defended walls: the laptop at the piazza café table instead of the PC in the gated condo.”3
In many of the analyzed projects the return he return to design strategies typical of the more radical social housing projects of the Sixties and Seventies is evident in many of the analyzed projects, but with some important differences from the past. In the first place there is the abandoning of the more properly lecorbuserian theme of relationship between macro-building and landscape: most contemporary projects that are characterized by the complexity of the interior public spaces are located within the urban fabric and offer these spaces more as a supplement to traditional public spaces that as an alternative. Secondly the bond that once linked this project strategy to ultra-social housing is broken, coming through the identification of this kind of buildings with social deprivation. Finally, the scale of the analyzed projects hardly reaches that of the past, and even in larger areas, it has been abandoned the idea of fixing large portions of territory with a single building. Today we can return to study these cases in their architectural consistency, seeking for suggestions for urban housing design in the Information Age, returning to require an attention to social relationships and community that is a very complex challenge for architecture.
One of the more representatives architect of that years, the Dutch architect and theorist Herman Hertzberger4, clarifies the principle that the design of the distribution spaces of residential buildings is the key to manage socializing aims in urban housing design.
In their study on the relationship between social networks and design of public space in the Information Age Marcus Foth and Paul Sanders noted how, in the most interesting contemporary housing projects “on enlarged stairway landings, seating is provided, a simple gesture that allows for resting on the assent to an apartment, a place to meet. Similarly, external corridors are articulated with protrusion outside apartment front doors that also encourage engagement through the opportunity to appropriate a balcony space, although part of the public domain is cared for as if private. […] These simple gestures inform how, with a dimension in design thinking beyond the mere functional minimum, the in-between spaces within a residential development can become more than just circulation.”5
The study of the paths of different types of users at different times of day (or night) becomes a key component in urban housing design: we can say that the building is designed with the conceptual tools of the city itself. Plans and sections are the key instruments for the construction building behaving like a part of the city. The novelty lies probably in the extreme variability of horizontal and vertical paths and in their different degree of privacy, conceived avoiding the schematism that characterized many of the projects of the past.
Frötscher Lichtenwagner Centrum.odorf Innsbruck (Austria)
Describing the Frötscher Lichtenwagner project Centrum.odorf Bart Lootsma says that it “is a village in a village in a city–and with the nursery as the smallest village inside, it is a project that not only reminds of Aldo van Eycks dictum that the house is a small city and the city a big house, but also turns Innsbruck in a set of Russian dolls.”6
Urban coHousing
In the Information Age privacy and freedom requirements lead to a strong isolation but, on the other hand, sociability and communication are a strong needing for inhabitants. If the redefinition of community relations in the Information Society is leading from pre-modern family and local communities systems towards a more complex and variable concept of elective community, this brings us towards a new kind of community, fluid and variable, based on shared values and objectives.
This process, already active and consolidated in other aspects of everyday life, for example the phenomenon of web communities or solidal buying groups, also begins to consolidate in urban housing design. In addition to this, today we need to conjugate urban densification, increase of urban population and right of access to facilities with the possibilities offered by new technologies to obtain the best result in energy saving and environmental sustainability.
BKK Sargfabrik + Miss Sargfabrik Wien (Austria) 1994-2000
The answer to these issues in European recent urban housing design is the construction of community-buildings that on one hand free space of private domestic activity, reducing its size without penalizing livability and on the other hand join those spaces and resources to ensure access to both functions removed from private space and new and more complex services otherwise both economically and environmentally too expensive. The main references for this strategy, more than the cohousing movement till now strictly connected with non-urban locations, is the experience of sharing space and residential social services typical of the social and public housing of Central Europe and Scandinavia. This housing design strategy finds a summary in the concept of extended-house, defined by Ezio Manzini: “The extended-house is a physical and social context divided into private, semi-private and public spaces where, in an open and flexible way, the different functions of everyday life are distributed.”7.
Till recent days the majority of the building designed with this principles were designated for categories of people with very specific needs, like elderly, differently-abled, students, and temporary residents in general. The specific nature of Information Society leads to an overrun of the dichotomy special – normal: studies and experiments carried on in these issues become now essential basis for urban housing design in general. Likewise this can be said for all those phenomena of extended house typical of some cultures (think of the common laundries frequent in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian housing, the Finnish common saunas, the condos services in the United States or the semi-private baths in Japan) turning out to be highly innovative when implanted in other cultures housing.
The extended-house, as mentioned above, is not a novelty in the history of urban housing design; in the Information Society, however, it seems to overcome both the government control and paternalism of the public housing from the Twenties and Thirties, and the strong ideological and anti-urban character of the cohousing movement.
Outside In
“If we look around with fresh eye we find ourselves in a new landscape. As our models of virtual and actual landscape begin to overlap, we also see in our everyday surroundings a beauty that is calm, vital and strong.”8
In the last decades the need for a strong bond with nature and landscape has become central in urban housing design, leading to a new aestheticised and contemplative relationship with the outside world. In many of the projects covered by my analysis the external landscape, urban or natural, is a fundamental element of the interior design: it determines, or accentuates, the quality of space and the possibility of identification by inhabitants. This is mostly obtained by radically opening the buildings outwards. This openness is a visual relationship, rather than a real physical connection between housing and the outside. One of the cornerstones of this important change is probably the changing idea of privacy from the pre-modern and modern culture.
“The privacy in the private house, since its inception, has been predicated on a discernible separation of its inhabitants and activities from both the public realm and other houses. The private house has also been from its establishment a building type that enshrines family life to the exclusion of all other activities. Furthermore, as a space so dedicated, it has been for almost four hundred years largely responsible for the creation and development of those rituals and comforts that we now associate with the domestic. Today, however, these conditions are undergoing tremendous change. The evolving cultural definition of the private house generates significant opportunities for architectural invention. This change is also taking place at a time when architecture is being fueled by enormous new technical and material resources. The private houses discussed here, and the architects who designed them, can thus be seen as not only reconfiguring the domestic landscape but laying the groundwork for the first architectural debates of the twenty-first century.”9
In contemporary culture housing, and private spaces in general, are strongly autonomous from the collective spaces of life. The concept of privacy has changed from a principle of shielding visual relation to the outside to a matter of distance, sufficient to prevent any interference, allowing landscape to become the background of living. The changing relationship between man and landscape in the Information Age is extremely complex and delicate and can be considered the second fundament of this new design strategy. From the nineties Tomàs Maldonado, Marc Augé, Kenneth Frampton, Ada Louise Huxstable and Jean Baudrillard, among others, deal with this theme on several occasions. The debate is effectively related by Neil Leach10 who, in his The Anaesthetics of Architecture, summarizes some argument around this issue. First of all architecture today is affected, according to Leach, from a society saturated by images. Secondly we live in an era in which the visual, which is based over the most abstract and elitist of the five sense organs, triumphs. The natural consequence is an aesthetic based on the rapid succession of images and characterized by a strong aestheticisation of the artistic and cultural messages. Finally the separation between form and content in recent years is producing paradoxical phenomena. Leach proposes these arguments also, and above all, for a critical reading of contemporary architecture, but these statements are also useful to understand what’s new in the relationship of the inhabitants with the outside world.
Xaveer de Geyter Park Apart. Chassé Terrain Breda (Netherlands) 2001-2002
The outside of the building, whether it is nature, anthropic landscape or a modest courtyard, takes the connotation of a background for living. The openings, hence the window or, often, entire portions of the facade, disappear, losing the complex nature of filter of the typically bourgeois windows, to become frameworks (almost TV screens) bringing the landscape into the house as a part of the project.In some of the projects it was possible to identify a small variation of this design strategy, much less frequent, pointing to carve openings with freely composed views of landscape. This strategy appears more frequently in smaller and more traditional housing. In the vast majority of the projects the relationship with the landscape is obtained with the complete lack of large portions of the outside walls, replaced with ground-ceiling windows that often, thanks to tiny metal frames of considerable technical complexity, almost disappear.
Inside Out
“Set in the midst of the universe, man needs a place of peace, seclusion, as part of the greater, hostile, amorphous world outside, a space which all the same, receives its share of day and night, sun and moon, heat and cold and rain. 11
The difficult relationship between the needs of living and the urban context has always been a key element of urban housing design. One of the oldest and more difficult objectives of housing design has always been founding a synthesis between the compact body of the building and the presence of private open spaces that can radically change the character and quality of the flats. In the daily struggle against urban sprawl, the presence of an open private space, even in the form of a terrace or a small patio, that should be able to become a real part of the flat and which may be decisive in determining the quality of the domestic social life, is particularly crucial.
These spaces, from a certain point of view, have always existed in urban residential buildings but have often been the exception, both quantitatively and qualitatively, rather than the norm. The challenge of a lot of analyzed project is defining design strategies able to manage the compatibility between what I have generically called patio-terrace and the urban building, both compositionally than the economically.
EM2N Hegianwandweg Housing Project zurich (Switzerland) 2003
In most of the analyzed projects, the patio-terrace is obtained by an extension and re-interpretation of balconies and loggias, always present in the tradition of urban housing. Through the use of more or less complex systems of parapets, protections, blinds and shading system integrated in the façade, balconies and loggias, increased in depth, become real rooms, losing their character of juxtaposed element and gaining a constitutive role in the formal definition of the building.
Hard Core Living
In most of the analyzed projects the internal structure of flats has to meet a consolidated demand: flexibility. The house must be flexible, not in the dimensional sense but providing spaces for different interpretation, adaptable to changing uses.
“In an era when lifestyles are accelerating and splitting up, flexibility is no longer a luxury but an indispensable requirement. We work at creating a kind of architecture that defines spatial qualities and is yet open to individual appropriation and programmatic changes.”12
The flats are potentially open plan, avoiding not only structural walls but also, if possible, vertical supports in general. They are often characterized by the strategic placement of a technological core-element – usually containing bath- and other secondary rooms and, where required, the stairs – that guides living spaces without predetermining them.
“Flexibility is not the exhaustive anticipation of all possible changes. Most changes are unpredictable.[…] Flexibility is the creation of margin-excess capacity that enables different and even opposite interpretations and uses.”13
LOOS architects Holiday Apartment Amsterdam (Netherlands) 2006
The kitchen is normally attached to one of the core’s walls and, in the more interesting examples, all sides of the core-element are equipped walls ready for different uses.
This design strategy uses artificially ventilated bathrooms, an option not everywhere allowed by building regulations and not always shared by different cultures. The positioning of a central block containing the WC is often accompanied by the division between the toilet itself and other functions of the bathroom, often placed freely in the open space. Even this strategy is totally natural in some cultures, easily assimilated in others and with very little acceptance in some countries. For this reason these kind of flats have hardly success in more traditional sectors of society, while they are a prerequisite for the inhabitants of the more globalized classes, as they increase not only the flexibility of the houses, but also their characterization.
We can easily apply to the flats built according to this design strategy the description that Iñaki Abalos makes of the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe patio houses: “no existe un espacio clausurado che podemos denominar dormitorio sino que las casas se organizan como un medio continuo que hace requiebros y localiza sus objetos y muebles de tal forma que, por el grado de aislamiento otenido mediante estos requiebros, es sencillo determinar la privacidad de cada punto y su uso previsible” and also “una vivienda organizada topológicamente, basada en la continuidad y la connectividad”14.
From this point of view urban housing design is a delicate balance between large areas of permanence and micrometric but fundamental mutations. While it is clear that the measures and functions of living are preserved in millennia, leading to the inevitable incredible similarities between the plans of the most modern Manhattan condo and of a residential insulae of Ostia Antica, emerges on the other hand how important mutations take place as a consequence of the changes in lifestyles and ways of use. If it’s now clear, for example, which were these mutations during the Industrial Revolution, both technological and typological, there’s still a lot of research work to be done to understand which changes are ongoing today.
These results, also if provisional, have important practical implications in constructing new methodological grids for setting up deeper analysis of projects and – as a further and more interesting consequence – for starting to build a set of flexible guide lines for interior design in dense urban context. High-quality dense urban housing might be one of the more interesting answers to the complex demands of the contemporary age on issues like creative economy, mobility, sustainability and the general lack of space connected with the urban growth of European cities.
Originariamente pubblicato in: L.Basso Peressut e altri (a cura di) Places & themes of interiors: contemporary research worldwide, Franco Angeli, Milano, 2008.