7 Prototypes for Compact Cities
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Lecture/Conference
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:12
I have the pleasure to introduce Oliver Thiele, who of course you all know, or at least most of you do know, because he was teaching here last year,
00:21
and we thought to make a case for how good he is, it was important to welcome him back also this year. That of course is part of the reason. The other reason is that metropolitan architecture, as we try to figure out what it ever could be, in parallel, as you know, with the studio project as it is evolving, in parallel with the kind of dialogue with our unit here,
00:48
the Magna Valle unit on the one at the Etihad. There's also this third, I would say, parallel, which is of course these four positions, which we hope we have carefully chosen, starting with Christoph van Herwey trying to figure out what on earth metropolitan
01:03
would have been in relationship to Freud, Paris, Tokyo, to a kind of hyper-individual, kind of organized society. And Bach, I think, summarized perhaps a little bit, and I think it was a very
01:20
good way to start because he can give a kind of theoretical context, if you want, of the studio, which we could either take or leave. Then we had, of course, Francois Chabonnet, who showed his heavy idiosyncratic machine-like architecture,
01:41
which we felt somehow was touching upon the more high-tech-like of desires we might have here in the studio, and I think he very much engaged in that. We had Fabrizio Balabio, maybe from a young historian's perspective, introducing this strategy of San Felice,
02:05
and how San Felice himself, almost with only one device, and I think the word device here is probably appropriate, this particular kind of shared staircase, was able to transform an idea of a somehow individual collective of these big building blocks in Baroque Napoli.
02:26
And so we end with Oliver, and why Oliver? Because we think that he's personally, and of course together with Andre, the one only architect today who's able to resolve the problem of housing in an interesting way,
02:42
and that's exactly because they tried to be as uninteresting as possible. So, for that reason, we thought that was probably close to what we could understand as metropolitan architecture in housing, something like, or something closest to, I would say, an oxymoron.
03:00
So I leave the floor to Oliver. Thanks. Good afternoon, thank you very much for the invitation. And I don't know exactly how much time I have, but I have to start at about an hour, so I will do it relatively quick.
03:20
So, and the issue I would like to talk today is a bit about the way how we, let's say, work on housing, and what you see already is that, okay, compact cities in Europe, something else than in Asia, but let's say we are very much, as an office, interested in the production of prototypical solutions,
03:43
because we think, I mean, it's a bit strange idea to try to make interesting architecture. It's, I think, much more interesting to try to work on a certain topic and try to see architecture as a sort of product,
04:01
especially in housing, that is, I think, very interesting, because the question is always in housing, how can you produce with a limited amount of means, a sort of maximum of quality. And we are all aware that the means are limited, but the question is what means quality narratives.
04:25
But before I start, I will just quickly show you a little bit what we do more in the office, so we are office in Rotterdam, we have a quite international team, and let's say the issue we are dealing with is always the question, how can you combine the, let's say, the cheapness of 21st century with the rich history of our profession,
04:47
and that's a sort of daily question in the work of the office, and in the last years we have been working on, let's say, a couple of public commissions,
05:05
so in different, let's say, conditions, this is a new building in Austria for concert hall, but we do also quite a lot of transformation of historical monuments, and sometimes also myths,
05:20
and in the moment we work, let's say, more for, especially universities, also several big scale school buildings, and also transformations of existing buildings in existing contexts.
05:48
And when I talk about housing, to be honest, I'm not a big fan of housing, because I think when you are an architect, or let's say as an architect, I think that I always wonder if housing at the end belongs to the world of architecture,
06:02
because the fact when you think what is architecture, architecture should deal with proportion, should deal with space, and should deal with, let's say, the precise use of materials, and when you look at housing you find out that this is very difficult, because the issue of proportion is not really an issue in housing,
06:21
very often you have already predefined the solutions that you have to use, it's basically adding, and we see always housing a little bit more as a sort of social service, but also social service is somehow okay, because you have an education, and at least you can offer something to normal people,
06:42
because you think it's quite a way to try to do something for ordinary people, and in a way housing is a very political issue, especially for us, because we grow up in the East, and in Eastern Europe,
07:02
I mean housing was always, I'd say, something where you could show the future, it was the materialization of the dream of the future, and very often I mean this dream was not so exciting at the end,
07:22
but what we see at the moment, because of the fact that in Europe a lot of cities are growing at the moment, and that there is an enormous need of housing at the moment, and we see that the issue of housing is becoming more and more political again somehow, and let's say when we were kids we always were wondering about the poor quality of contemporary housing in the 70s,
07:48
and we always had the idea of, hey, when we were architects we could make something different, and you get a bit older, you find out, hey, you look again at a photo like this and you think, maybe not so bad, it's done with someone,
08:01
and what for us is really confusing is that the issue of contemporary housing is very confusing, because there are a lot of contradictions, and we have somehow as architects to deal with these kind of contradictions, and I just made a sort of simple list that we have to deal with,
08:22
whether you see, for instance, the relation between ecology and economy, for instance, an interesting one, or specific and neutral, but also individuality and collectivity, so there are a lot of these kind of themes that are somehow at the core of the development of interesting housing solutions,
08:45
and what I would like to show is, or whatever you think now, I'll just quickly show you some prototypical solutions, and I included also the last issue, the refurbishment of slab housing, this is not really belonging to the prototype theme,
09:04
but it's also an issue I would like shortly to mention. The first project is, I think, a very Dutch one, in a way, is a project for strip housing in Amsterdam, and the reason why we are interested in housing,
09:25
and that's actually, by the way, a diagram of the city of Geneva, is the question that, I mean, it's not that you always look for possibilities, and as I already said, there is an enormous need for housing at the moment, because production was too low in the last few days,
09:43
so that means there is a lot to do, you can survive, and there is maybe also the possibility to invent something, because it's always like that, and the pressure is high enough, then there is also space for it. And, but it's not only about production,
10:01
I think, let's say, what we think is an important issue, when you look on the, let's say, on the European condition, then you see that, I mean, the last, since the 50s, the development of European cities was very much defined by the development of suburbia, so that means the main cities didn't grow anymore,
10:21
people moved to the countryside 50 kilometres away, bought a house, and they're going every day by car to the city centre, and we see that this lifestyle seems to be over, because people cannot afford anymore two cars, both partners have to work, because you cannot live off the salary of only one partner,
10:40
and it means that suburbia is in Europe now, nowadays very much under pressure, and a lot of people move from the countryside back into the city centres, and that you see actually everywhere, you see it in Hamburg, Cologne, Antwerp, Brussels, and so on, and that's the thing that you think, and the question is for us, let's say,
11:00
our point that I would like to make is, that a lot of people that come back to the city centres have this kind of suburban lifestyle, so you bring in also new expectations, so they don't want to live in an existence minimum housing, they want to have something else, and the question is how can you implement suburban qualities into the city centres,
11:24
and let's say we worked in the last years in a couple of these kind of projects, and for us, as I already said, the combination of economy and ecology is a very tough one, and seeing the fact that there is very limited economical means,
11:45
we always use a sort of, I would say, 1950s strategies from offices like Atelier 5, where you say, okay, we just try to work with a smaller span, and try to make a deep plan, reduce the amount of facade surface,
12:01
like that we can realize a bit higher quality, and we have a bit claustrophobic situation, and we just try to, let's say, open the situation, bring in a lot of light into the structure by using a lot of glass, and by making holes in the floors, and introducing white spaces,
12:21
so very simple, I mean, you can see this kind of stuff, so it is a very, I would say, modernistic strategy, and something I would like to show is a housing project in Amsterdam, we did a couple of years, and then the issue was here to remove an existing apartment building,
12:41
to build 23 townhouses, and we organized the houses in a way that we could find a clever solution for the parking, because, let's say, the problem we have in Holland, we cannot afford a parking garage for a terrace housing,
13:02
but we had to realize a lot of places, and we actually proposed the typology of the drive-in house, but the drive-in house is always not completely the ground floor on the street side, and you cannot park on the street anymore, because the drive-in house is actually not so smart,
13:23
and what we did was we turned the drive-in house 180 degrees around, so we had to put the street on the backside, and we park on the backside of the house, so it means we have a free facade towards the street, and we have, let's say, a kitchen on the ground floor, and living room on the first floor,
13:41
we combined both with the void, and we, let's say, basically offered two different outside spaces, we have a bit more collective garden at the front side, and we have a private terrace on the backside on top of the parking garage, so it's quite simple in a way,
14:02
we see it also in the floor plans, so it's very straightforward, and in our way of working, we also very much inspired by this kind of modernistic attitude, but also that what we learned in East Germany at the school,
14:20
so it's very much based on a sort of rationalistic approach, so trying to make good foundations very clear, trying to set up a very clear skeleton, and then just fill the skeleton with apartments, and we work a lot with prefabricated elements, because when you work with repetition,
14:42
then you can use prefab, and prefab is very often, in terms of quality, better than when people do the work on site, and then you see a bit of the project on that, you see a very rigid structure, so basically you can still see the construction, what we like a lot, as a sort of basis for the organization of the houses,
15:05
and one of the problems we are suffering a lot in housing is the fact that I already mentioned that it's not really architecture, so you have to introduce very often some clumsy tricks to keep the things together, and especially here you can see that,
15:21
because let's say when you see from ergonomics a part of you, that what we did here as well is that you have to, we had an aluminum system for the facades, it was the best way to do these facades, but we had to use for the head facing steel plates, because they were cheaper and more stable than aluminum, and on the backside we had to use,
15:40
or we could use wooden windows, because the windows were a bit smaller, then the question is how you bring all these kind of weird materials together, and you can make a brilliant collage, and we don't like so much collage, because we were looking more for something but the foam's really a sort of more stable entity,
16:04
and at the end we decided to paint everything white, because it was the only way to keep this mix of materials somehow together, but it was also already a trick that was invented in the 90s, so you can see the buildings by Schinkel, for instance you see very often that the classicism
16:21
already at that time was a very cheap one, and let's say talking a bit about suburban qualities, you can see here on the east side of the facade, towards the park, these kind of big terraces that still bring in
16:41
a little bit suburbia into the city, and you see the most surprising space in the entire project parking garage, and you see that even if the house is all small,
17:01
the inside measure is 4 meters or 50, that it's still light and open, and a quite nice place to live. And what we do quite often in these housing projects is that we, in terms of building physics,
17:20
it's always not so easy, because you have to tune quite a lot to get building permissions to build these apartments like that, but very often at the end, two years later, we send people a letter and just ask them about the houses, just to find out if the things were expected, and we do that for two reasons.
17:41
One reason is that you can learn a bit if the calculations and the expectations you had are right, but on the other hand, it's also super smart in the discussion with the clients, because very often the clients pretend that they know everything, and if you show something like that, then they say, okay, fuck it.
18:01
And you can have really a sort of clear augmentation why people like certain things in their living room. And we always have this kind of fascination for the production of these neutral, grey, relatively solutions, and we were very happy
18:20
that this project was included into the new Norfolk, because it fits very much into our way of thinking, too. And at the moment, we do a new, low-scale housing project, quite compact,
18:40
even more compact, actually, by the way, in Holland, and the construction is installed next month. The next thing I would like to show was a sort of study commission we had for the city of Groningen, but I think it was an interesting question,
19:00
that's why I would like to show the project here, because the city of Groningen is a city in the north of Holland with about 100,000 inhabitants, and they decided, okay, we need a bit more compact city, we don't want to have really a lot of growth on the outside, but they noticed that people were not so interested to live in apartment buildings,
19:20
because they have a lot of apartment buildings, and they said, if we want to attract people, or if we want to convince people to stay in the city, we have to offer more individualized housing in high density. It was a sort of interesting, I think, an interesting question.
19:40
And also a bit typical for Holland, because Holland uses this question quite often, and they had quite a nice site close to the city center, and the question they had was actually quite insane, because they said, okay, when you look on the diagram on the left-hand side, you see the normal density of the raised housing estates in Europe,
20:05
it's about 35, 40, 30 houses per hectare. That's maximum. And then they said, yeah, actually what we want is basically the double. So they said, we want to have low-rise housing, but with double density. Then you come up with the second diagram,
20:23
and then you see that the distance between the houses is so similar that you cannot imagine any more people could live there. And then we tried to find the organization how to manage, and what we actually proposed was a sort of double building block, also not something that was completely new,
20:41
because I think in Amsterdam in the 1920s, you have already housing projects using a similar system. And the interesting thing was that we, let's say, with this kind of housing block, we could make terraced houses, and the ring on the outside was orientated to the top, and the ring on the inside would be orientated
21:01
towards the courtyard, and it produced this section. So we made the houses on the outer ring a little bit bigger and on the smaller ring a little bit smaller, with an interior street six meters wide. And it was actually the model we produced, and you see a little bit how that could work.
21:26
So the distance between the block was about 25, 30 meters, and you can see the zone that we used, or the access of the apartment, six meters wide.
21:42
And actually we tried quite hard to do it, so we actually had two projects where we tried to make it. One, we were already very close, but then we had to, then it was cancelled, it was a bit of a pity, but it was quite, let's say as an issue, it was quite interesting, and let's say this kind of topology
22:01
was also in terms of, let's say how you look on it, actually interesting because you don't know anymore do we talk about terraced housing or do we talk about apartments, and it was in terms of interpretation of the government rules, interesting one, and because of that, it was also interesting to talk about,
22:20
let's say when you talk about energy, you don't know anymore, is this facade here, is it really outside or is it already inside? So it was also, let's say this kind of topology offers also, let's say some possibilities for energy efficient solutions. The next project I would like to show
22:41
is a topology of the tower block and I'd like to show a project in Svalers, in the north of Amsterdam, and for us, let's say looking back on the development of architecture in the 20th century,
23:00
we are always very much fascinated by this image because of the difference we notice, because when you look back on Le Corbusier, then Corbusier, let's say proposed the Maison Domino as, let's say a radical solution for housing, so we have floors, we have columns,
23:21
and we have staircases that form somehow the basis, and then he started with architecture, so it means he always used that system, it was more or less given for him, and then he started to design facades and voice bases and so on. In our case, if it's different, let's say that we see it not so much
23:43
as the basis to design, but we see it actually as architecture, so we think that maybe, especially when you have no money, this is maybe already enough, and especially when you go to the south,
24:01
to Greece or to southern Italy or to Egypt and so on, you see this system very often as the basis principle for the production of housing, and we think there's a lot of quality in it because you see there's a sort of freedom and often you can imagine very different kind of uses and we think that's an interesting quality
24:23
that an architecture could have that you don't offer a fixed solution, but you offer basically freedom, and this is also to do with the next image because, I mean, in the 1920s, architects tried to, let's say,
24:45
produce with their design a lot of freedoms for the inhabitants, and they proposed a certain lightness of the community, and I think this lightness somehow became a reality because the Bauhaus turned directly into IKEA,
25:06
and you see that even in Europe, I mean, the lifestyle is becoming more and more light and people become more and more flexible, and I think the difference between housing and office, for instance, is not so clear anymore
25:22
as it was a hundred years ago. And now coming back to the tower block. I mean, if you have the chance, I think we like the tower block very much because of the fact that the tower block is a very efficient typology, and whenever we have the chance to design
25:41
or propose a tower block like a typology, we do because we know that in terms of, let's say, price, a quality relation, you can produce relatively okay designs with it. And let's say the strategy we use is again the strategy of the 50s, I would say,
26:04
where, let's say, we try to make deep floor plans, we try to organize the apartments all along on the edges, we put the access in the middle of the block so we have, again, a bit of a claustrophobic basis,
26:22
and we try to break this claustrophobic situation by opening the façade to the maximum. And we could do it in a relatively straightforward way in this housing project in Swallow, and it's a mix of 50% student housing, 50% social housing,
26:47
and we particularly like that project very much because you can read in this project two dependencies. On one hand, it's very much inspired by our love
27:02
for rationalistic architectures, and also when you close your eyes, you can still see a little bit of a little bit of means. But on the other hand, when you look on the,
27:21
especially on this kind of situation, then you see also that we are belonging a bit to the post-punk generation, so we like also very much this kind of anarchy in these projects, that there is a sort of freedom that you can do, that people have a sort of freedom to do something they want. The façade is not, let's say, an element that regulates
27:43
the relation between outside and inside, but in that case, more a sort of interface, let's say, where you have a sort of screen, and you can, let's say, adapt the screen to your personal wishes. The project is actually very simple and organized,
28:03
and the good thing was that we had even a little space over in the middle of the block, so we could introduce a void through the Google project, which you can see here, actually, that's the void.
28:21
And on the ground floor, we made a double entrance wall, very similar, and then you get to this section. It is, in reality, quite amazing because you come, you see the building project, and from the outside, you don't expect that there is a sort of bigger space
28:42
that is open in the inside. And there, again, a lot of repetition. We try to work relatively close together with the industry to find out, on one hand, how they think,
29:00
and on the other hand, get no price for the products we use. And it's in the idea of, in the beginning, it was quite an investment in Google, but you sort of normally build up certain knowledge, and with the knowledge, you come also a bit quicker,
29:22
and you'll see a little bit more. And the interesting thing, let's say, about this project was that it was built for relatively ordinary budget for social housing, and in terms of quality, it's far better than the stuff you normally would get.
29:43
And what we like, you can, here in this project, you can open 50% of the facility, and it means that the project in winter looks quite amateur-wide in summer. A lot of things in the windows are open, and it's dialogue with the surrounding.
30:03
Let's say when you enter, you see here this entrance wall, and then you come to the normal floor, so when you leave the lake, you see this kind of situation. As you can see, I mean, in social housing,
30:21
there is not much money, so it was also, for us, very painful to design this project, because the concrete you see is not in-situ concrete, it's just the ordinary concrete you get,
30:40
and just industrial lighting, very cheap steel handrails, and acoustic ceiling, but still I think it's perfectly okay. And it was at least interesting to offer a little space
31:00
to the people to share together, and when you come there, because especially it's student housing, there's a lot of things going on in the corridors, and it's quite, it's quite, and what we like very much is that, let's say, looking back on the history of modern housing architecture,
31:23
that when he saw the old building in 1930, the juvenile housing was heavily attacked, and it was a lot of people who pretended it was possible to live there, but nowadays you see that the loft became very much common-sense,
31:42
so when you go in whatever bookshop in the countryside, they have always at least three or five books about lofts somewhere in Vietnam, and the only question is what we have nowadays, how can we afford this kind of housing, and we're very happy that we could, let's say, make these kind of apartments,
32:02
they are 100 square meters, and people pay, I think, 540 euros per month for these houses, and it's, let's say, for Holland, quite amazing that you can get that kind of housing. The next project is Project NDA,
32:22
again about strip housing, but this time about the gallery, and talking about housing is also really strange, because on one hand, we always say minimalism is not a choice,
32:40
because you see that when you look back on production of architecture, that money became less and less, so there's less to design, and we can hardly, let's say when you see in this project, there's not so much design, and because you see everything, all standard products, and you just put them in, and that's it, and you see that there's sort of global tendency, so you take every very cheapest product,
33:01
and the housing project is finished. But on the other hand, you also wonder where the money disappeared, and we experienced it actually very clearly in this housing project. On the side was a housing block by the famous Dutch architect,
33:24
and the housing corporation decided to knock the block down, and because they couldn't drain away it, because the apartments were open enough, and so on, more flexible, and so on, and the strange thing was that they asked to rebuild the same amount of houses,
33:45
but actually the size of the entire project was the double size of the housing project of the dock, but there lived half of the people, then in the fifties, so that means within sixty years' time, everything was growing by factor of four,
34:02
but it's really insane, but this also describes the other side, we became so rich that within sixty years, we could go from twelve and a half square meters per person to fifty, and in the fifties, they had maybe four of these houses,
34:21
they had maybe ten cars, and now they have houses. So it was quite tough to do that, and in the end we used a lot of know-how from the project I showed you in Oslo to find a solution for the parking,
34:42
and we set the project up as two parallel strips, and in the slab, we had on the ground floor a mezzanine housing, so we made duplexes at the ground floor level,
35:02
and on the upper floors we could not avoid the gallery access apartments, which we don't like, not very much, of course you know that you have always a little bit of a privacy problem, especially if the apartment is only on ground floor,
35:27
but it was actually the only way to manage within the costs, we wrote also something about sustainability, because the strange thing is that the project was so big that we could use a geo-determinate insulation,
35:45
and by doing so we understood that insulating the facades is not so important, because when you have these machines you can save so much energy that you can do with the facades what you want, and that's why we also think that the issue of sustainability
36:03
should be solved on the urban level and not with the architecture, because it's far too complicated, and of course it's far too much money, and then you see a bit how the new project looks, again a lot of repetition, big entrance in the middle,
36:23
and in that way, in this project detail, for the first time the facade really more or less independent from the structure, and the interesting thing was because of the fact that the project is quite big, we could also put the guys from the industry a bit under pressure,
36:44
because everybody wanted to do it, and that had actually two advantages, the first was that we could rebuild a big mock-up of one of the facades, because the housing project was used for elderly people,
37:02
and the client was a bit nervous of the combination of sliding doors and elderly people, and then we had the mock-up, and then we rented a bus from the elderly organization, went there with 20 elderly people, and then they tested the facade, and because of the fact that these elderly people are very often quite modernistic in mind,
37:23
they were very enthusiastic, and then the client had to say, okay, we do it, if the people can deal with it and they like it, we do it, and the other thing was that because of the fact that we used a lot of aluminum, we could redesign the aluminum profiles the way we wanted,
37:44
and just to get a bit more elegant and fascinating, and another issue was because of the fact that the project was very big, we could use the 70s technology, the famous tunnel construction, and by doing so, we also could reduce the costs,
38:03
because of the fact that the construction of the entire project could be built within only three months, it would normally take six months, and because of that, it was very low actually, and we tried to use the construction again as a direct basis
38:22
for the organization of the apartment, and tried to make it within the construction community rooms, and the funny thing was that the housing corporation was a little bit afraid of our anarchistic facade facade, and then they said, okay, we have also a bit of money over,
38:42
so we give you even money for curtains, so the curtains belong, let's say, to the facade, so when you rent an apartment, you have to rent it with these curtains, but you have a second rail where you can put your personal curtain, and here you see how it looks in detail,
39:08
and that facade, entrance hall, staircase, and then you see the heating, the races on the first floor,
39:23
without plants actually, and then the galleries on the upper floors, and this is something very Dutch, and we tried to make the gallery a bit wider, and to give people the opportunity to occupy a part of the gallery, and Dutch people do that,
39:40
because they belong very much to the Dutch culture, and it's okay for them, I think. And you see a bit the interior, so you have a loft-like situation, and on the ground floor you have a mezzanette housing, and you see a bit the curtains work,
40:00
and we built at the moment in Antwerp a similar project, but then for, let's say, for the free market, it's a quite expensive apartment, and it's actually the first time that we can use
40:21
a sort of prefabricated concrete façade, so we have panels from up to four by four meter, so we are very close to what our friends in Switzerland do, like dinner in dinner room, and I think even in Belgium it's complicated,
40:41
but we could do that, because we are at the moment in an economic crisis in Holland, and we could find a Dutch company that was willing to do it, and really transport all the stuff from Holland to Belgium, and that's how we got to the maximum finish.
41:01
And the interesting thing is that I talked in the beginning a little bit about suburbia. You may hear apartments that are 120 square meter surface, and they have a 60 square meter outside space in the form of waterlogs, so it means that there are a lot of elderly people that bought their house, and they basically bring their garden into the city center,
41:22
and you see a photograph of the terrace, so they're all between 10 and 12 meter, and then two and a half meter deep, and you can open them up and you have them on both sides, so it's quite nice, so we are actually extremely happy that that happened,
41:41
because my partner Andre was working on the broaching, and I always make jokes about it, and he said, you will never make that, it will be impossible, so the problem was so quick that that really happened, so it was quite, we were really lucky, and we just recently won another competition in Germany,
42:01
where we were all again working with the gallery, but this time in combination with Duplex, where we tried to really make family houses in high density, and we hope that we can build it soon. The next project I would like to show is a bit a strange one,
42:22
because it's not really housing, it's something between housing and hotel, it's a sort of project for heroin addicted in Amsterdam, and we are very much inspired by the issue of healthcare, just because of the fact that the European population is getting older and older,
42:45
so it will change a lot the architecture, and I think there are really new solutions for housing possible, because you can suffer from it,
43:00
you can say, oh fuck, we have to do only wheelchair, but I think also the level of typology, this will be used in types of housing, because we need much more flexibility, and adaptability of apartment projects, and we already from the beginning of the office proposed that,
43:23
because we had always the naive idea to say, okay, we offer a sort of very simple loft-like basis, and then we say, okay, you can use this for filling in apartments in different size or office spaces, but nobody was really interested, and it had just simply to do with the fact that the market for housing
43:41
and the market for offices is completely separated, so people that do housing, they don't speak to offices, and what is interesting is that in the whole healthcare world, this is becoming close together, and the issue of flexibility, people also understand that they have to build more flexible structures,
44:03
and the project we built in Amsterdam was actually organized very simple, so it's a sort of square-ish plan, based on a grid structure with columns, so we can basically, if they want in 30 years, we can take out the complete interior and new arrangement,
44:25
and then we have only one floor, and that's it. So we have a very simple structure, it's basically based on columns, and because of the fact that we had to do a lot of smaller spaces, and all the spaces behind the place on the facade,
44:43
we had on the inside always a little bit of a sort of mod, because we had to fill this square-ish block that was given in the old plan, so we proposed to make a big 9x9x9,
45:09
and on top of the living room, we put the little parts in, allowing people to go to the outside. There were also some specific conditions regarding the facade,
45:22
because the fact that there are aeronautical people in the room, they were not allowed to open the window, so we had to design basically a building like a refrigerator, and we also were wondering what that would mean for the facade,
45:42
and we quickly found out that we could not afford structural things, and we used a sort of alternative system to fix the glass panels, and that was quite typical for our way of working, because we talked to a company that was specialized in that, and then we said, okay, we can fold this kind of aluminium plates to fix the plates,
46:04
but we said, actually, we don't want that this is folded, but we want to have them extruded, and the guy said, yeah, you know, you only take 1500 kilos of aluminium, and if you want to extrude them, I mean, it's only physical,
46:21
if you only work with three different profiles, and then we had a guy in the office who was a bit free for that, and I said, two guys, I said, hey, come on, we should try to do it with three profiles, can you do it, and then they made the design of the profiles, and basically we made a detail where we have one vertical that you don't see,
46:40
but we have those two profiles, and you see that on the top, we turn them around, so we have only these three elements, and by that we could, let's say, make this facade with specially produced profiles, very slanted, only like, five centimeters,
47:02
and we had a discussion with the housing corporations about this band, because they wanted to make a facade with bands, and it was not feasible, they didn't want to have outside insulation, and then the question was what to do, and we said, okay, maybe we can use a system with glass tiles,
47:24
and the glass tiles were far too expensive, especially when you use the Italian ones, and then we went on the Alibaba tour, so we found a company in Amsterdam that, let's say, imported glass tiles from China,
47:41
and with FedEx you could negotiate it with these guys, we had always more cups, and at the end we brought the tiles in China for, I think, 20% of the price of the Italian ones, and that is really, let's say, that you only do because of the pressure,
48:01
because the economic pressure is so strong that it was the only way to get it done at the end. The courtyard on the top, space in the middle,
48:25
and how it is used. And again, the facade, as I say, this is separated from the structure, producing this kind of strange space, like quite a lot.
48:45
And we especially like the Hannes Meyer way of living, of the inhabitants, because they really have nothing, you just take what you find on the street and live there, and it's quite inspiring somehow.
49:01
And actually do, let's say, work with similar type of machines, also in our projects, we are doing work on a healthcare village in Heisler, in Belgium, where we do, say, elderly housing, we use atriums for different collective uses,
49:23
and we also worked a couple of years ago on a project for student housing, where we tried to stack different kind of, these kind of spaces to, let's say, separate or indicate different communities.
49:48
Let's say, at a certain moment, the Dutch economy was very, started to become very bad, I think 2009 or something, and then we said, okay, the housing market completely collapsed
50:01
because there were too much houses, and then we said, okay, we have to export our knowledge of housing, if you want to survive, that was very simple, this is an economic question. But we also found out that we had to adapt that to different local building cultures, because in Europe there is not one building or living culture, because when you look on every country, they are always feeling for, let's say, different.
50:25
And, let's say, this is one of our first housing projects drawn, housing projects in Paris, and it's also against the housing that was proposed to work with Wintergarten
50:41
as a basis for the organization of the house, because, let's say, we like Wintergarten quite a lot because they, especially in urban situations, they can function as a sort of, but they also very often have a sort of noise protection function,
51:03
and they can give also a little bit more privacy on outside spaces, and especially this project, it was quite important, because we are very close to the Boulevard and territory in Montmartre, and we had to do two very small urban villas,
51:24
because it was not possible to change the urban plan, it was very often at all, and a lot of countries thought that, let's say, the urbanists basically defined it with the design, and then at the end you come in and you find out there's not so much to design anymore, because everything is defined, designed by the urbanists, and actually should be
51:41
our way around, and the architects should define the urbanism, and not the urbanists. And we proposed two blocks with public functions on the ground floor, and with the blocks on the top. And you see the typical French floor plan,
52:04
we could not really avoid, we see here an extremely small, nasty staircase, we see all housing projects in Paris, and then here again you have these typical housing typologies for France, called T1, T2, T3, and T4,
52:23
because basically 80% of the city are built with the same type of housing, which is actually a very horrible idea, and the only difference, let's say, we offered was the fact that we said, okay, we have to accept it, we cannot escape from it, and the only thing we were to say is, okay, what we do is we make
52:41
a balcony all around, we make the balcony deeper, and we make a double facade, and by that you have a sort of winter apartment, and we tried to make the apartments as open as possible to, let's say, transform these different situations in something that we could accept, because there was not
53:02
the mode to reinvent something new. And what was interesting was that we were very much focusing on the building method, French clients were completely irritated with what we were doing, so we were really very much trying to predefine already how the builders had to build
53:23
to get the project into cost, we tuned quite a lot, but at the end we could, let's say, manage, and we made apartments a lot far more open than they usually are, and I think also in quality they are better than what you normally find
53:44
on the housing model, so we have this kind of balcony all around, we have a double layer for noise protection, climate protection, and the projects are moving under construction, we are actually also really shocked about the building quality in France, because you can
54:00
really see what 30 years of neoliberalism means to Europe, it means that at the end you really wonder if people on the building side know what they do, because the knowledge is so cool that the difference between North Africa and, let's say, France is not existing anymore, in terms of quality
54:21
we have also a project in Morocco, it's really the same, we're really shocked, let's say, about the reality on the building side, but okay, we managed, and this is a photograph from two weeks ago, so the blocks are on the way of completion, and you see
54:42
the facade with the outside layout of winter gums, and we are really looking forward to the result. The last project I would like to show is not really a typology, but it is
55:02
a sort of a thing, when you talk about metropolitan housing, I think what is very important, because it's the issue of refurbishment of the core ensemble, because what we see is that, I think
55:22
since the 70s, we see already that the percentage of transformation projects is growing like hell, while the new projects are really going down, especially in Holland, I think the peak was in the 1970s,
55:41
they built in Holland 250,000 apartments per year, and at the moment they talk about a common boom, so it's going a little bit better, we talk now about building 40,000 a year, so you see that the production since the last 40 years really went down by 80%, 70%,
56:07
while transformation is becoming more and more an issue, for quality reasons, but also for sustainability, and there's also the new guys, a lot of empty estates, in terms of techniques and problems to tackle,
56:26
but refurbishment means nowadays also something else than in the past, because it was relatively easy to renovate
56:43
the building and adapt to the conditions, but nowadays we see there are a lot of norms and regulations that become stronger and stronger, and they are not only for new buildings, but also for existing ones, and what we see is that the gap between, let's say, what the government wants and what
57:01
you can do is becoming bigger and bigger, let's say, means pressure for this kind of project, and the office we do from time to time this kind of refurbishment project, we more or less by accident got the 2002 commission for the refurbishment of 800 apartments in Holland, it was for us a very
57:23
disappointing project on one hand, because we couldn't do it so little, but on the other hand we learned really a lot by doing it, so it was a sort of quite tough school to work on that project, and what I would like to show quickly is a project we do at the moment in Antwerp, where we produce
57:43
actually a lot of knowledge from the past and we can go much further than we could go in the project that we just showed, and this is a project for the refurbishment of two slab buildings, and they are
58:00
from the 1970s, and they completely run down, and actually the housing corporation wanted to knock them down, but then they found out that when they were knocked down, they could only build up to four floors, and they said no, no, no, we should keep them, because otherwise we cannot build
58:21
enough houses, and the houses have quite some problems in terms of how the access is organized, because it's really strange, because this is the front side of the apartments, but the access is basically on the backside, hardly do you see from the outside,
58:41
and it's quite tricky, and galleries have closed, but the apartments have actually quite housed you on the landscape, and what we actually do is very simple, just show you some of the
59:02
diagrams that we have in the buildings, a floor plan somehow like that, and what we do is we demolish the entire interior, we take everything out, but we also demolish the staircase and the stairs,
59:20
to organize it a little bit in a more logical way, so what we actually keep, the only thing we keep is the skeleton, and then we put new cores on the entrance of the building, by doing so we can orientate the entrance walls towards the street, and we put balconies
59:42
on the east side, all around the block, and by doing so we can give the apartments also a big outside space, what we don't have at the moment, and what we like quite a lot is the next step, by doing that we can even take out the, we can even change the construction, so we take out the
01:00:00
the concrete walls that are necessary for the stability because we put them now on the outside. So it means we take out these walls and we put those ones, but we do it in two steps. So we could force the core and then take it out because otherwise the structure would collapse. And then we get a relatively flexible basis in between and we fill in different types of housing
01:00:27
according to these stupid regulations that we have to use that again offer not so much freedom. And now that's actually the situation at the moment, so we are just on the way to removing everything.
01:00:44
And we are actually super enthusiastic because you see that demolition can be also quite funny. And what we do is that we wrap the facades with glass balconies and a lot of glass plates.
01:01:03
You see them here. And you see here the new entrance walls towards the street and the apartments on the ground for all the access from the street. And then you see the balconies on the upper floors. You see a little bit of the detailing of the entrance situation and the adaption of the galleries
01:01:25
and the interior, new interior of the apartments with the glass balconies. And that is another project where we actually have a completely different situation here. We basically try to keep everything that's made from this.
01:01:43
Thank you very much. Yeah, well, Oliver, there's so much to see. It's amazing.
01:02:06
Maybe – I have a very silly question on the detail level, which is not so important. I was wondering, now the last project you showed the transformation of the building.
01:02:22
Is it because it's economically also viable? Or is it purely because the rule of not being able to rebuild it? That makes it an option. I think this project is actually for us a very cynical one. Because we have to keep the apartments because of the building regulation.
01:02:44
Because if they would knock down the buildings, they were not allowed to get higher than four floors. So by that they would use a lot of units. And because of the fact that they need units, they keep the structure. But from an economic point of view, this project is completely insane. Because we have actually the same budget even more than the housing slab in the Hague.
01:03:09
But it has to do with this kind of funny way how the Flemish bureaucracy is organized. You have a famous tableau from the housing corporation. We are very smart in that because we understood that it's a bureaucratic way of designing.
01:03:25
And we designed actually in a way that we could get everywhere maximum money. We first studied it. And then we said, okay, we should try to get everywhere the maximum. And so we put everything in to get the money.
01:03:41
And what was also interesting was, I'd say that's a topic that I agree a lot. Just the last detail I would like to mention about the project was that actually when you look on refurbishment, there is a law that you have to maintain 25% of the facades. Because if you remove more than 25%, it's not a refurbishment anymore.
01:04:02
And what we do is, we remove actually this facade and that facade. We keep the head facade. It stays there. But in the end, we recover. And by doing so, it's still refurbishment. And that means that the rules regarding energy are lower and also for other stuff.
01:04:24
And it was the only way to get it into this kind of, to manage within this jungle of regulations. So it is quite an interesting issue. But you see, let's say very often, that would be also understood, let's say, is that because we are working now for social housing corporations in Belgium, France, and in Germany,
01:04:44
in Holland, there was an incredible freedom to design inspiring housing buildings because the corporations had a lot of freedoms. While in the other countries, everything is more or less freely found. We have less freedom, if not, because to say basically what you have to do,
01:05:03
you can only design around the rules. I don't want to stick to this, of course, very beautiful, and I don't want to go to Belgium again, but maybe more in relationship to our studio. So Metropolitan Architecture and Housing.
01:05:21
When we started the studio, as was already mentioned by Christoph, I suppose, somehow the argument was, Metropolitan Architecture, if you think about examples, it's not so easily related to housing as such because you think of other constructions, maybe more related to infrastructure, shared infrastructure, and so forth.
01:05:43
Of course, the challenge has been from the beginning to connect it with housing. Now, I must say, surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, you gave seven types, and each of them, you seem to emphasize very consciously on how the way people live, and being hyper-individual, if I could say like that,
01:06:03
is almost a kind of meta-argument for metropolitan housing, whatever that means. How do you see that yourself? The transformation here, of course, is of a 70s building with a certain idea of what the corridor is, and the idea of the share. We were talking about how in Holland, perhaps, still people would like to be on that shared corridor
01:06:25
and have a chair there, with Paris, from Antwerp, and so forth. You have increasingly this idea that you are somewhere, and you prefer being totally alone. Is that something you think very much as part of the project, or are you trying to challenge that?
01:06:43
I think at the end, you can only design stuff that is somehow possible, because I think it would be much interesting to think about more shared spaces, and about more, let's say, facilities, organized communities within the city. Like they do, for instance, in Vienna, where they have a sort of quite special housing program,
01:07:02
where these kind of, let's say, elements are included in the building. But what we see is, and the problem is I couldn't talk today really about it, but at the moment we are preparing something maybe for next year, and it will actually deal with the issue of neoliberalism and housing.
01:07:22
And what we see is that the production of housing is at the moment limited by a lot of factors, because we see that investments are very often not bigger than 50 houses. The urban villa is seen as the most safest solution,
01:07:41
and we have only apartments in certain organizations, only flat, no mezzanets, and so on. So everything in Europe turns to become the same. For instance, I was a real architect, to go always to the Vienna, because that's interesting. I think that I had this year in March the chance to go to the Mippin in Cannes,
01:08:02
the real estate exhibition. And for me it was really a shock, because the funny thing, the funny lesson from this exhibition was that the housing projects in Europe were everywhere the same, not even all the world, because you see everywhere the type of Paris-like urban villa in different heights,
01:08:20
maybe six stories, four stories, up to ten. But that's it basically. There's nothing else. You see only this kind of typology, and the other typology you see is then a sort of terraced housing. And there's nothing in between. And it has, I think, to do with Westman, it has also to do with security, and there also seems to be a sort of new image
01:08:42
of what housing is in Europe. I think it's quite tricky and tested with regulations, the finance structure, the energy rules, and so on. And it's really difficult to imagine that there will be, again,
01:09:01
a sort of freedom like there was in the 60s and 70s, where you could really invent substantial solutions. For instance, you have this kind of very nice book from modern housing prototypes from Harvard, I think, from the 70s. I mean, if you look through the book, you can actually throw it away, because 80% of the solutions you cannot use anymore.
01:09:24
And in that way, we are not so optimistic on the future of housing, because it seems that it's less and less freedom. Have you been working last semester or so? Have you been working last semester or so on, on scale, many houses?
01:09:41
Do you see, for example, if you would shop yourself from your own seven types, do you see there elements or fragments of an answer on a much bigger scale, instead of 10 or 20, 700? Do you think every of these is valuable, or are there certain thoughts you could share?
01:10:02
I think we did basically the studio last year, because the fact that we are very much irritated about the way how the contemporary city is produced, because you have urban planners, as we discussed, and urban planners are very, I think, from my point of view, very uninspired professionals,
01:10:21
because the problem is that urban planners always pretend that they have the mortgage of the production of the city, but they don't have the mortgage, because I think the production of the city was always based on the fact that it was always a typological issue. There was always an idea about how could you produce the city,
01:10:40
and it can always do with lifestyle, economy, and so on. And the problem is that, especially seeing all these new regulations, it's quite obvious that we need new typologies to tackle the issue of housing, but you can only tackle these issues if there is a sort of influence from the bottom to the top.
01:11:01
That means that urban planners with new type of architects, that invent new typologies, make urban plans, and that it is possible to realize these kind of typologies, because if an urban planner has not so much knowledge about the organization of houses, so he's always designing what is already there,
01:11:20
and limiting completely all the possibilities, then they ask you, and we have to very often in Germany, and we are invited, and we say, can you design affordable housing? I say, yeah, fuck you, you cannot design everything with this plan, because if you have a block of 12 meter, I mean, you can never ever make something what is interesting. So you have to first develop the typologies, and then try to think about what kind of, let's say, urbanism that produces,
01:11:45
and then you have to make this. You have to check. I think this is a bit the issue in a way, I think, because cheap housing or economic housing is only possible if you have also a grid on the urban plan, and on the bigger scale,
01:12:00
because basically it's also a question of bigger scale, because if you have a bigger development, then I think the building prices also go dramatically down, because companies are really willing to invest more time to get it. I would love to go on with the conversation,
01:12:22
but I think the Shinken is already here. Maybe we should already invite everybody for Shinken to come. Thank you very much. Maybe afterwards I just feel we could maybe reconnect a little bit.
01:12:42
Thank you very much.