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Architects: Architectuuratelier Dertien12
- Area: 1002 m²
- Year: 2014
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Photographs:Luc Roymans
Text description provided by the architects. This refreshing project is the winning entry for an architectural competition in search for new typologies in social housing. Within the strict envelope of urban regulations (2 storeys with pitched roof) we managed to offer 6 internally different houses.
The key trick in this project was the reformation of the garage into a living area: this act surprised the neighbourhood with see-through-houses, instead of exclusive, private-garden oriented dwellings. All cars in this project are banned from the houses.
To restore the balance between the surfaces on ground floor and the upper floors (a strictly regulated diagram in social housing in Belgium), we nested the game of void-choosing ownership: within the strictly typological envelope, the future owners were invited to make 2 decisions: how would they like to install their extra gained space (faced to the street), and where would they like to ‘air’ the interior with a void.
Three voids are possible: in the kitchen, in the ‘ex-garage’ and the living room. Playing the game of letting future owners interact with the final architectural result, the social houses gain an intense interaction between intern floors on the one hand, and between public and private life on the other hand. As every owner is triggered to choose his own layout of his house, 6 identical differences stood up from the rather uniform, surrounding allotments, and transcend classical social housing typologies.
