Unconstrained by the dogmas of established offices, new architectural practices can often challenge building norms and redefine living standards. The Young European Architecture Festival (YEAH!) is an event dedicated to highlighting these new and emerging practices and bringing their contributions to the built environment into focus. Many of these practices are challenging and redefining typologies of residential architecture. They are building upon ideas such as cooperative housing schemes, community-initiated developments, and circular economy. Others are exploring local identities and resources as a way to reinvigorate the profession while creating respectful and regionally relevant works of architecture.
As part of the festival, the Otto event divides the contributions into two distinct modules: habitats and hybrids. Each session contains presentations of built projects realized within the last decade. It also introduces open discussions and debates with emerging experts in the fields of documentation and illustration, along with editors and publishers working in the field of architecture. YEAH! is an initiative curated by Philippe Nathan (Luxembourg) and Gianpiero Venturini, Itinerant Office (Spain)/ New Generations. The festival took place from April 15-17, 2022, at the Kulturfabrick, a non-profit cultural center in Luxembourg.
Read on to discover YEAH! 's selection of projects by emerging practices that are redefining notions of living spaces.
50 Sqm for 5 People/L'atelier, Nomadic Architecture Studio
The project started with a rather ambitious brief: converting a 50-square-meter one-bedroom apartment into a home for a family of five. The qualities of the spaces played an essential role in the success of the project, like the ample amount of natural light, high ceilings, and the square floorplan. The architects also considered the changing dynamics of the family: when the eldest children leave, the spaces can be easily reconfigured to create a bigger living room or bedrooms.
House of Chicken/ SO?
House of Chicken is part of an art and architecture farm that aims to revitalize a neglected rural area and transform it into a tourist attraction without losing its valuable rural characteristics. For this project, the designers took on the challenge of working with a user who neither demands nor pays for the property: chickens. The usual brief underlines the reciprocal relationship between architecture and nature and reconsiders architecture's primary role: providing shelter from the elements.
090/ Fala Atelier
A ground-floor shop and its basement were converted into an apartment. The resulting spaces are defined using volumes and varied textures. The stone pattern extends from the house outside as a black and white striped frieze, marking the garden's perimeter. This acts as a grand horizontal window framing the context. By recognizing and working with the existing urban tissue, the intervention hopes to bring attention to the potential of an otherwise cheerless 1960s housing block, thus applying pressure on the real estate market in Porto.
La Borda/ Lacol | arquitectura cooperativa
La Borda is a cooperative housing initiative, the first of its type in Spain. The development is self-organized by its users, aiming to develop a non-speculative housing system. The project establishes a series of principles. The first is to redefine the collective housing program. The new design enhances community life by stretching living spaces from the private to the public. Secondly, the project is set to create the lowest environmental impact possible. Above all, the housing cooperative is helping its residents achieve optimal comfort in their homes with minimal consumption.
Schoonschip/ Space&Matter
Schoonschip is a floating residential development of 46 households in a former industrial area in Amsterdam. The project is community-initiated and mobilized by Space&Matter, a multidisciplinary practice. Schoonschip is built on a circular economy model, which rethinks the way we organize cities, both spatially and socially. The system creates a connected community while also tackling the systemic roots of climate change. It offers off-grid decentralized and renewable solutions to water, energy, and waste systems and allows residents to trade and redistribute critical resources. The residents can also choose the individual architect to design their house, leading to a great diversity of materials, styles, and building types.
Beyome/ Enorme Studio
Beyome is a housing project that seeks to create an environment that can adapt to the flexible lifestyle that defines this global and dynamic society. The project addresses flexibility in housing by developing four typologies that fit different stages of life: Thrive, for personal growth after graduation; Family, when creating a family; Health, for post-retirement; and Care, when additional care is needed. The project also tackles problems of accessibility to housing and the need for high-added value services.
Avala House/ TEN Studio
The project is a single-storey space built over an existing orchard garden in a pastoral landscape near Belgrade, Serbia. The house is a case study on how design can turn sufficiency into a desirable form of living. The Avala House aims to become a prototype for an ideal contemporary home by using everyday materials and by welcoming and integrating the skills of local makers to create a product of regional significance.
La Nave/ Nomos Architects
La Nave is an industrial structure transformed into a sequence of spaces that blend workspaces with domestic areas. The direction of the intervention is rotated by 45 degrees against the existing structure, thus exploring the potential of diagonal lines and allowing for an optimized floor plan. The solution also helps bring in natural light. The resulting typology reorganizes apartment living by shaping sensory experiences like the winder garden, graduating its intimacy levels, and refining the use of daylight.
Proto Habitat/ WALD
Proto-Habitat is part of Proto-structures, a set of three experimental buildings that develop three interactions of timer-structure architecture. As the first building in the group, Proto-Habitat is a fully demountable structure that allows for multiple uses, from living and working to an art gallery or public space. The Solar-Proto is a building that explores architecture's potential for offering electricity and water autonomy. The third structure, ProtoCAMPO, included a 6 meters inflatable dome that can be used as a space for gatherings and community events.
Casa Witiza/ Beatriz Alés Atelier
By transforming a domestic space in Madrid, Casa Witiza also reveals the evolution of society and the needs of families from the Franco era to the present day. Initially a Francoist social housing development for families of limited means, the complex is now recognized as part of Madrid's urban heritage. The remodeling project is set to create more continuous spaces while respecting the external dimensions of the original unit. The "visual noise" of the interior spaces has been reduced by eliminating the skirting boards and limiting the number of materials used, thus providing a clean canvas for the little artifacts that make the place a home.
A House in a Garden/ David Leech Architects
The project is a contemporary reinterpretation of an ordinary suburban house. The house is built economically, using everyday materials and techniques easily sourced and knowledgeable for a local builder and tradesman. These materials and methods are amplified and exaggerated to become something at once ambiguous yet familiar. The design also takes inspiration from the premodern understanding of building elements as potential materials for generating atmosphere.
JNS/ saas
JNS is a conversion of an industrial space into a living and working environment. By challenging the standard configuration, it also questioned zoning, normative contort, and the daily use of architecture. The building introduces a series of flexible elements, like movable glass fronts or thermic curtains that allow the users to create subspace. The use of space follows and adapts to the seasons and the programmatic needs of the users. The spaces are currently monitored as part of a year-long study.
House in Richterswil/ Stefan Wülser Architektur
While most architecture today is developed in a rational and mathematically justifiable way, housing projects are ultimately decided by trends or personal non-argumentative preferences. The images generated are detached from the design and essence of the houses. The house in Richterswil attempts to reduce the new elements to the absolutely necessary and gives character to the ordinary aspects of a building, like the pipes, the structure, and the openings. They are therefore transformed into exalted and unusual actors in a space that allows them to become the cornerstones of architectural expression.
President/ CENTRAL office for architecture and urbanism
A roof pavilion with two terraces extends the living environment of an apartment towards the cityscape. The intervention is an extension of a private housing building in Brussels that takes advantage of the privatized roof of the three-storey building. The roof pavilion, connected to the renovated apartment below, offers additional living space, a kitchen, and sanitary facilities. It also enhances the use of the two exterior terraces generated.
Editor's Note: This article was originally published on
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