Better Affordable Housing Project

Description

Often, compact housing is neither associated with quality of living nor community. On the contrary, the notion easily leads the mind toward sad and socially impoverished concrete towers. But it doesn’t have to be like this: limited floorage and quality of living can be conjoined in architecture that encourages people to engage in each other. Better Affordable Housing, or in Danish Bedre Billigere Boliger, is an architectural example of how the construction of compact housing can move forward; an example of how people can live together in the future.Plato’s spatial concept, “Chôra”, where space is understood as a contextual situation of which the residents and the housing complex form part, was the conceptual starting point for Better Affordable Housing.  The housing complex is perceived as a scenario within which we, as human beings, are involved as a situation where the space’s existence and qualities are only understood in relation to that which takes up space, including movements and the social life.Central to Better Affordable Housing is the efforts to create the best possible settings for a thriving and informal neighborhood. With the residents’ interaction in mind, the individual building is predisposed toward situations where inhabitants can come into contact with each other. In Better Affordable Housing, it is the choreographic features – the paths and entrance bridges – that motivate the interaction between the inhabitants. All movement to and from the apartments takes place through the central squares and the access balconies. Not only do they constitute avenues of access; they also constitute social spaces, with the possibility of informally meeting everyone from the neighbors and the people living across the corridor to visitors from the neighborhood. The entrances constitute unavoidable passages to and from the home, consequently rendering neighbors and the people living across the corridor unavoidable. What arises is a social space that the residents find hard to avoid: a place where acquaintances and strangers can bump into each other and where a friendly chat can take place. In Better Affordable Housing the social is not so much something that you have to choose, but to a greater degree, something you have to choose to do without. Another example is the entrance balcony. Instead of private balconies the access balconies have been extended so they constitute balcony areas adjacent to the front doors of the dwellings. With the entrance balcony, a semi-private space is created as an extension of the private home; an added space that makes it a little easier for the community to grow. The access and entrance balconies actualize the potentials that are latently pre-sent in physical proximity, the rhythm of everyday life, and in everyday flows: when the architecture causes rhythms and flows to overlap, the possibility of contact arises.In Better Affordable Housing, the interior spaces give the individual a great deal of freedom to imprint his/her personality on the apartment. The dwellings consist of one fundamental architectural space: a large room with the proportions of the brick, trans-illuminated by French balcony doors. With the individual apartment’s position in mind, the windows have been placed so that the light is optimized. The room’s height, in conjunction with the inflow of light, results in apartments with generous spatiality despite the limited floorage.The basic space consists “solely” of a central core, around which sanitation facilities and kitchen are situated: a core that allows circulation and divides the apartment into two natural zones, with varying degrees of views and openness to the surroundings. The raw space can be fitted out and divided into additional zones or genuine rooms, as needed. In this way, an open basic space is created, a space that is varied and individualized along with the ongoing completion of the apartment.People’s ideas about the good life, living conditions and needs change. That is why the dwelling has to be adaptable. It must be able to accommodate life’s many large and small twists: the life that the individual chooses – but the qualities of the fundamental architectural space must never get lost with the adaption and individualization. Good architecture can accommodate life in all its diversity. (Description provided by Juul Frost Arkitekter)