BERKEL – HOUSING FOR STARTERS

Tender competition.
Program: Two blocks of 6 affordable houses for starters.
Budget: €1.800.000
Location: Berkel en Rodenrijs, The Netherlands.
Design: 2013.

This project for a traditional Dutch row housing development focuses on the market for ‘starters’, asking for sustainable housing units with limited construction budget and affordable prices. The traditional scheme foresees private plots with house on the front and storage on the back, separated by a private garden. This scheme is obsolete, especially when destined to youngsters. Furthermore, the traditional scheme generates unfriendly circulation space on the back street, reducing it to mere logistic spaces for bikes, not exploring any possibility to improve the collective space.
Our scheme starts from this simple observation; we propose to create a ‘collective community’ for starters, by moving the storage spaces from the centre of the site to linear volumes on the perimeter. This gesture frees the centre of the site, making it ideal to host a collective multifunctional open space; a sort of condominium garden, where all inhabitants can either claim their piece of privacy or engage relationships with the neighbours: barbeques, parties or simple chill-out can take place in this flexible enclosed space.