This social housing block in Slovakia by Bratislava studio Nice Architects features a series of protruding balconies that angle towards sunlight whilst blocking out the noise of car traffic below (+ slideshow).
Nice Architects shaped the balconies in accordance with the sun’s trajectory across the facade of the four-storey North Star Apartments building, which is located in Senec, a small town outside of Bratislava.
The architects were tasked with creating social housing situated on a busy street that would be visually appealing but came at a low cost – €500 Euros per square metre.
“The goal was to enrich this locality and create an iconic, easy to remember and original building, as an opposite to the patchy and chaotic surrounding development,” said architect Tomas Zacek.
The building’s location, opposite the town’s observatory and perfect north-south orientation inspired the architects to name the building after the famous star.
“North Star is not only the brightest star on the northern hemisphere, it was traditionally used for high seas navigation,” explaned Zacek.
The building contains nine one-bedroom apartments across its three upper storeys, while five small shops occupy the ground floor.
Each apartment features one of the angular balconies, which protrude from the all-white facade at different lengths.
The top corner of every balcony is exposed to the south, reflecting the sun’s rays into the apartments. As the sun traverses the front, the shadows alter the appearance of the building depending on what time it is. They also offer seclusion from neighbours.
The lower sections of each balcony are deliberately enlarged on one side to shelter the space from oncoming traffic.
Balcony concept diagram
The windows that do not feature the enclosures are fitted with Juliette balconies and a small outer area covered in gravel.
Scheme concept diagram
All of the windows in the development face directly west, giving residents the opportunity to enjoy sunsets over the local school garden across the street.
Scheme concept diagram
On the ground floor, the facade is made up of monochrome stripes graduating from black to white to deter graffiti artists.
News: residents of a Brutalist housing development in London have persuaded Channel 4 to screen a home-made version of the broadcaster’s ident after a lengthy campaign against its “inaccurate” portrayal of life on the estate.
The offending ident is used by Channel 4 as programs are introduced and depicts a desolate concrete urban environment strewn with rubbish, washing lines and satellite dishes.
“The ident includes embellishments such as bin bags, discarded shopping trolleys and graffiti — all added in post production,” explained community worker Charlotte Benstead. “The Aylesbury has had a long and undeserved reputation. Channel 4 is just emphasising the negatives.”
“It’s a bad thing,” Benstead added. “It points a finger at anyone living on a 1970’s estate and makes a statement about how people there live.”
Still from the original Channel 4 ident
Attention has focused on the ten-year-old ident following a recent campaign by tenants to force it off the air. As part of the battle, Aylesbury’s residents teamed up with filmmaker Nick Street to create a new version of Channel 4’s original.
“Residents are fed up with seeing their homes on Channel 4 shown to be dirty and messy,” said Benstead. “We wanted to remake it showing how the estate really is.”
Following continued pressure from the community and widespread media coverage, Channel 4 has offered to showcase the community’s version “based on liking the creative, not on a belief that the original is wrong and needs to be replaced.”
Still from the original Channel 4 ident
Channel 4 refutes all claims that they have created negative perceptions of the community and vows to continue broadcasting the ident.
In an email to campaign organisers, Channel 4’s Charlie Palmer stated that the ident is “a conceptual creative which doesn’t claim to represent a specific place and is never identified as the Aylesbury estate.”
Channel 4 will broadcast the ident created by Nick Street on Friday 14 March at 9pm after it’s introduced by an announcer. Residents have been promised a preview of the script but are yet to see it.
The Aylesbury estate was designed in 1963 to house 10,000 people in response to the chronic housing shortage of the day by Austrian architect Hans Peter Trenton. The project was the largest, most ambitious postwar public housing scheme in Europe at the time.
In 1971 the first tenants moved in and the estate’s architecture quickly came under attack. As architect and city planner Oscar Newman toured the estate for BBC’s Horizon program in 1974, his conclusion was that modern architecture actually encouraged people to commit crime.
Victim of cost-cutting and poor construction, the Aylesbury became emblematic of the shortcomings of postwar public housing and a byword for crime and poverty. Incoming prime minister Tony Blair used the Aylesbury estate in 1997 to deliver a message that there would be “no more forgotten people” in Britain. Despite the setbacks, in 2001 the majority of residents voted against its demolition.
French studio Perraudin Architecture has completed a social housing complex with solid stone walls near Toulouse as part of a bid to prove that “anything that is built today could be built in stone” (+ slideshow).
Perraudin Architecture, which also recently completed a stone house in Lyon, specified huge 40 centimetre-wide blocks of limestone for the walls of the three-storey building located within a new residential district of Cornebarrieu, north-west of Toulouse.
“Stone is the most abundantly available material on earth,” said architect Marco Lammers. “It is an extremely energy-efficient resource […] and, when used with intelligence, it can be cheaper than concrete.”
The studio treated this project as a case study to test whether stone can be used for buildings that need to adhere to both a tight budget and strict energy-saving requirements, and managed to deliver on both counts.
According to the architect, the load-bearing stone walls will provide a natural air conditioning system that absorbs excess heat and releases it gradually.
“The result is a truly contemporary stone architecture, rooted in the economy of simplicity and the pure tectonic art and pleasure of building,” said Lammers.
No paint or plaster was added to the walls, so the stone surfaces are left bare to display traces of the quarrying process. Projecting courses of stone on the exterior mark the boundaries between floors and help to direct rainwater away from the windows.
A total of 2o apartments are contained within the building. Bedrooms are positioned along the northern facade, allowing living rooms to be south-facing and open out to sunny terraces.
Larch was used for doors, window frames and shutters throughout the complex, and are expected to show signs of ageing over time.
Perraudin Architecture is now working on the next phase of the project, which will involve the construction of a larger housing complex using the same materials palette.
Photography is by Damien Aspe and Serge Demailly.
Here’s more information from Perraudin Architecture:
Massive Stone Social Housing, Cornebarrieu, France
Since its rediscovery of stone Perraudin Architecture has come to believe that anything that is built today could be built in stone.
After realising several massive stone buildings – including wineries, single housing and a school campus – the opportunity to build 20 social housing units in Cornebarrieu provided an excellent test case. Is it possible, to truly build in stone within the strictest of economical and energetic restrictions? With a brief featuring both a very limited budget of 1150 euro/m² and the strict demand to be granted the label ‘Very High Energetic Performance’ within the French standard of High Environmental Quality?
The result is a truly contemporary stone architecture, rooted in the economy of simplicity and the pure tectonic art and pleasure of building. An architecture made to age and made to last, searching to exploit to its maximum the great visual, environmental and structural qualities of its used materials.
The building is entirely built up in load-bearing limestone walls of 40 cm. Precise coursing elevations define each stone, to be extracted, dimensioned and numbered in the quarry and then transported to the site. There, they are assembled like toy blocks using nothing but a thin bed of lime mortar.
Each detail is a true stone detail. Large openings are formed by flat arcs with keys stones. Window sills are dimensioned in limestone. All perforations for ducts and for descending the rainwater from the roof are included in the coursing plan and carried out at the quarry. At the height of the concrete floor slabs ‘cornices’ project rainwater free off the building’s walls all the while doubling as guide rail for the blinds.
Construction image
The building is located at the outskirts of Cornebarrieu, a town within the metropolitan area of Toulouse. It is part a new residential neighbourhood extending the town towards its forested western edge.
It is based on a series of simple principles, which we have come to apply and refine over time. All materials are left untreated. As much as possible, all materials are left untreated, with no paint, no plaster. The woodwork is in larch, left to age with time. The stone acts as natural air conditioning, its thermal mass absorbing and releasing surplus heat and humidity. For reasons of comfort and ventilation, the housing units are systematically continuous from facade to facade.
The bedrooms are in the north to take advantage of the summer freshness while on the south side a large terrace extends the living room, with nothing but a glass wall as separation. The staircases remain in open air and to enter the apartment one enters by the loggia. Flexible blinds protect this terrace and allow it to be used as a buffer-space softening climatic variations.
Life within this housing unit moves with the weather, one can activate and deactivate its great thermal mass while spaces change dynamically from being inside to outside according to the seasonal comfort.
The project has been nominated for the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture Mies van der Rohe Award 2013, the Equerre d’Argent 2011, and was winner of the Prix Développement Durable – Concours d’architecture Pierre Naturelle 2011.
Furthermore, the building has been finished within budget with its stone construction finishing well ahead of schedule. Due to this success, we are currently building the second phase of the development – 86 collective and individual housing units, partly social – using the same construction method and a budget below 1000 euro/m².
Compact balconies puncture the solid white facade of this social housing block in Mallorca by Spanish architects RipollTizon (+ slideshow).
RipollTizon designed the building for low income families in Palma de Mallorca’s Pere Garau neighbourhood. It contains 18 apartments, ranging between 35 and 68 square metres, and includes a mixture of one, two and three bedroom apartments.
The corner block forms a six-storey tower, but drops down to three storeys on one side to meet the height of surrounding buildings.
“The result is a solid column with excavated voids where the openings are presented as scenes stacked upon each other,” said architect Pablo Garcia.
The building is divided into two different halves – separating apartments for rent from those for sale. Each side have its own entrance, with separate elevators and staircases with perforated brickwork screens.
The apartments have simple interiors, with white walls and tiled floors, plus each one has its own private balcony.
“The excavated terraces are the intermediate elements that relate interior and exterior while offering a private scenery that is built-in the facade of each dwelling,” added Garcia.
The building replaces a former block of courtyard houses. It sits on a base of grey blockwork and gently projects out towards the street.
The project is located in ‘Pere Garau’ neighbourhood. The area was formerly characterised by blocks of single family houses with inner courtyards that followed a typical grid plan. Once the district became central in the city, amendments to the urban planning increased the building volumes significantly and changed the typology to collective housing.
The project takes part of this transformation by redefining a corner plot, resulting from the addition of two former houses, into a new public housing building. The building is conceived according to the new volume specified by the urban planning and playing within its established rules: building depth and cantilevers to the street (of which half of its total permitted area can be enclosed by walls).
The proposal takes advantage of this situation to generate the mechanisms needed to link the housing with their immediate surroundings through controlled openings ‘excavated’ in the building mass. The result is a solid volume with ‘excavated’ voids, where the openings are presented as scenes stacked upon each other.
A small universe of stories organised under no apparent order, and whose arrangement emerges from the dialogue that the building establishes with its urban context. The different rooms of the houses are arranged along a central stripe containing the service areas. The excavated terraces are the intermediate elements that relate interior and exterior while offering a private scenery that is built-in the facade of each dwelling.
Client: Institut Balear de l’Habitatge – IBAVI (Balearic Public Housing Institute) Location: Capità Vila St. – Can Curt St. Palma de Mallorca Architects: Pep Ripoll – Juan Miguel Tizón Project area:2.816,55 metres squared Budget: 1.156.320,90 EUR Start of design: 2008 Year of completion: 2012 Collaborators: Pablo García (architect) and Luis Sánchez (architect) Quantity surveyor: Toni Arqué Structural engineer: Jorge Martin Building services: David Mulet Contractors: Contratas y Obras S.A.
Clean white buildings with identical doors and windows are arranged around a courtyard at this social housing complex in Mallorca by Spanish architects RipollTizon (+ slideshow).
Located on the outskirts of a small town, the three storey development was designed by RipollTizon with 19 units, comprising a mixture of apartments and maisonettes with either two or three bedrooms.
Both shutters and doors have the same wooden finish, intended as a reinterpretation of the fenestration found on other local buildings. “The layout and movement of these shutters by the users creates a changing and vibrant image that reflects the use of the building,” architect Pablo Garcia told Dezeen.
Elsewhere, materials have been kept simple and understated with white plastered walls and exposed concrete finishes. “The white coated surface of the facade provides unity and coherence to the complex,” Garcia continues.
The layout of the development is determined via a modular system, where smaller units for bedrooms, bathrooms and storage areas are added to larger units comprising living, dining and kitchen spaces.
“[The modular arrangement] allows us to create a varied landscape, rich in shades and tailored to its physical context without losing the quality, rigour and standardisation that the social housing development requires.” explain the architects.
Each unit is organised around a central courtyard and connected via a network of ground-level pathways and elevated walkways.
Square openings punch through the walls of the development, framing views both in and out of the complex.
The elements with which to develop the project are not far away. They are features that tell us about the climate, the context and the way we live. Simply walking around the place and looking at the courtyards, the filters, the light, the plots configuration, the small scale of the buildings, the singularity of each of the houses and the amazing configurations that emerge when they are grouped, not really knowing where one house ends and the next one begins. The aim is to give significance to the nuances and tangible scale of the domesticity and the details. Search the surprise.
Housing clusters – aggregation rules
We developed a catalogue of houses that were grouped three-dimensionally (aggregation) following rules that were precise and simple, but also open enough to solve a housing complex adapted to the diversity of situations that the programme and the context required.
From an urban point of view, the proposal complies with the street alignment and puts in value the depth of the plot exploiting its land use possibilities. The volume of the housing complex is stretched between the boundaries, playing with the party walls that limit the plot (obliterating some and putting others in value) and wrapping an interior courtyard that organizes the circulations and public areas, like a square.
Housing Catalogue
The housing units are generated from base module of single or double height (module living-dining-kitchen) to which other smaller spaces are added (modules bedroom-bathroom / bedroom-storage). The different possibilities of aggregation result either in different spatial configurations for a similar group of modules or in different house sizes depending on the number of modules added.
This spatial aggregation logic allows a flexible design process in which each house is considered simultaneously as a unit and in relation to the whole group. It allows to create a varied landscape, rich in shades and tailored to its physical context without losing the quality, rigor and standardization that the social housing development requires.
One of the main strategies of the project is to establish a careful dialogue with its context. The mentioned spatial values of the project are implemented throughout the use of raw materials that contribute to anchor the project to its surroundings. The white coated surface of the facade provides unity and coherence to the complex throughout a modest material that puts in value the space.
Ground floor plan
In contrast, the exposed materials balance these spaces (exposed concrete structure/slotted concrete blocks/perforated ceramic bricks/hydraulic concrete tile paving) creating textures and material qualities that relate he project to the context.
First floor plan
The use of window shutters in the houses, so characteristic in the area, is reinterpreted in the project using high-pressure compact laminate panels with colourful wooden finish. The layout and movement of these shutters by the users creates an changing and vibrant image that reflects the use of the building.
Architectural photographer Roland Halbe has sent us his photographs of a social housing project in Madrid by Spanish office Estudio Entresitio. (more…)
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