The congestion of the cities, the instability of families, the shortage of housing - all this affects how we will live in the future. But what good ideas are there, what has already become reality, what is a convincing, innovative idea?
"How do we want to live?" Is the question of the Social Design Award, which SPIEGEL ONLINE and SPIEGEL WISSEN, with the support of the Bauhaus trade fair, have announced for the sixth time this year. About 150 submissions were received, from Germany, Switzerland, but also from the USA or Ghana. The expert jury has now put together a shortlist of the ten best projects that we present here.
Now you are asked: Choose your favorite for the Audience Award! Vote until October 22nd - the vote can be found at the end of the shortlist. The audience prize is endowed with 2500 euros. The winners will be announced on SPIEGEL ONLINE on November 12th.
1. Affordable Palace
"Affordable Palace transforms the Royal Palace into an innovative co-living structure," states the description of the project soberly. But hidden behind a revolutionary idea: The Buckingham Palace in London is to be increased by six floors and provide housing for 50,000 people. That the Queen & Co. claims 775 rooms and 79 bathrooms, the young architects of Munich's Opposite Office no longer believe that they are up-to-date in times of housing shortages and rental price explosions.
Affordable Palace
Their design envisages clusters in which the private dormitories are grouped around shared dining and living rooms. Flexible partitions enable flexible living and living models. Of course, the rent should be capped, and that at eight euros per square meter. Efficient planning makes it possible to use only relatively little space for corridors and staircases. Of course, the architects know that their idea will remain an idea. However, they want to make a provocative contribution to the discussion on the right to housing and social justice with "Affordable Palace".
2. Bring Together
If you want to get to know neighbors, you can register at the internet platform nebenan.de. But what if you want to become a neighbor? And above all, if you do not want to find neighbors, but want to live in a collaborative project? The "bring-together" platform, founded in 2015 in Leipzig, has reached this gap. It now networks 80 projects and 400 project seekers in eleven countries, and has recently also given non-profit associations or municipalities the opportunity to create a profile.
Bring Together
Behind this is the company "Patchwork Communities": "Our goal is the promotion and realization of communal living and living arrangements as well as the strengthening of sustainable and solidary action processes in society.With our project, we want to offer a solution that renews missing family structures and people again brings in community thinking. "
3. Green Urban Micro (Moritz Schreber relaunched. Now!)
An allotment garden had leased the Düsseldorf architect and scenographer Hans Hermann Hofstadt, but had to find that he is unsuitable for gardening. Reports that big-city allotments are being sacrificed for housing, and his daughter's high rent for her dorm room, gave him an idea: how about putting two tiny houses to students or older people in every allotment?
Green Urban Micro
He invited students to a workshop in the allotment garden, where these pictures of their favorite Tiny-House stick to a picture of Hofstadt's allotment gardens. The architect has calculated: If each Tiny House costs 30,000 euros, then you come with amortization, interest and utilities on a rent of 200 euros. And if in every second of the approximately one million German allotments one stood, then one could - purely statistically - accommodate almost all first-year students there. Maybe they would do some gardening too.
4. Midwifery house
In the middle of the jungle of Ghana, on the border with Togo, the village of Havé stretches along a thoroughfare. 8000 people live here, half of them are children. That is why the birth ward is the heart of Havé. The catchment area is large, which is why a lot of midwives are needed. They have families of their own, and that was the problem: there was no living space for these families, which is why the midwives lived for years separated from their husbands and children.
midwives house
On the initiative of the Cologne Association Meeting Bismarck eV, a group of about 50 German and American students, German crafts trainees and Ghanaian vocational students designed and built a midwifery school and a dormitory with four units of 30 square meters each with their own kitchen, living room and six beds. The design draws on the traditional "Compound Settlement", in which the families live in close cooperation around a common area, and is designed with its passive climate concept for the difficult conditions in the jungle.
5. Backyard Dinner
"People live next door to each other in larger blocks of flats and never get into conversation" - this observation was the starting point for the "backyard dinner". Because eating together brings people together, the Berlin "Kollektiv Plus X" association came up with the idea of inviting neighbors to dinner together with a resident of the house. And in the backyard, where they cook together in a mobile kitchen.
Backyard Dinner
The goal is that everyone signs up in a contact list, so that they can also keep in touch. Because an anonymous neighborhood then becomes "a network with common interests". Among other things, the "Collective Plus X" has already attracted attention with the use of fallow land. It moves with its actions "at the interface of art, spatial planning, design and social work".
6. In the middle
It was a bicycle trip that brought the Hamburg duo "Gogtile" to the idea of being "in the thick of it": During the tour, the two discovered bridge piers and a paved road at the Tatenberg lock, which was built for something different than for cyclists: for the Railway tracks to the Neuengamme concentration camp. "Gogtile" opposes the "over-asphalting of history" with his design of a residential building that rests on a new bridge pier and is connected to the old bridge pier via a concrete platform.
In the middle
The house is said to be constructed of ecological materials and inhabited by people who share their belongings and use recycled furniture. The living room is to be moved outdoors into nature, as a café and meeting place for all who come over there. "The draft is to be understood as a plea for more responsible living, we should isolate ourselves less from the environment, more critically question our own comfort zone and try to think the unthinkable."
7. Nika
Two attempts to buy a property or building and convert it into a housing project had already been smashed, but then it finally worked out: In the late summer of 2016, a group of people from Frankfurt who wanted to live together received the city's pledge to build an old office building To buy station district.
Nika
The floor plans for the shared apartments provide that all bedrooms are exactly the same size, there are also on the seventh floor common areas and a shared roof terrace. On the ground floor there is a counseling center for Roma, a "community room" is available for various initiatives for their work, a third room is intended for art exhibitions or workshops. Since June 2019, 42 people have been living in the project "Nika", which belongs to the Mietshäusersyndikat.
8. Urban life in the countryside
A courtyard from the 19th century, 1200 square meters of living space, outbuildings for studios, workshops, co-working space, all located on a 60,000-square-meter plot, 50 kilometers from the center of Berlin: These are the cornerstones of the project Married couple from Celle and with his adult children living in Berlin.
Urban life on the life
Twelve families, but also couples or singles, are to move into four houses on the site in Brandenburg, out of Berlin and into a close-to-nature community life in which one shares cars, bicycles and common rooms, regulates the childcare together, is there for each other , Water and gas connection are now laid, now gradually the houses are renovated, inside loam plaster, outside hemp insulation. The "urban life" should also consist of "intercultural events", which means not only cabaret, but also discourses on the issues of our time.
9. we-house
we-house.life
Why, in fact, do you have to think about every single new construction project? How about developing a really good and sustainable concept and then implementing it in different locations? The "we-house" of the architects Archy-Nova from Stuttgart is trying to do just that. It consists of ecological materials, uses 80 percent less energy than conventional buildings, has a leafy façade, uses process water and, as an extra, has a pool filled with rainwater heated with solar energy and still water the plants in the greenhouse.
we-house.life
Cars, bicycles and much more can be shared, and the communal kitchen is open for all residents for lunch and dinner. And you can communicate via your own app. The office is planning a we-house in a high bunker in Herne, another in Stuttgart, and the architects also like to make a point in Hamburg's HafenCity.
10. #over morning
What does the ideal city of tomorrow look like? What do we want to maintain in the city of yesterday and today? These are the questions that the Viennese architecture firm AllesWirdGut asked in workshops and surveys. The office sees planning as a process in which future users are also involved. Specifically, these were the visitors of two exhibitions in Stuttgart and in the Czech city of Brno, who were able to contribute their ideas for a prototypical building, the "building block of tomorrow".
#wohnenmorgen
The office also did fieldwork on those who lived in an apartment designed by AllesWirdGut. At home visits, residents were asked how happy they were or what good, what was a failed plan? The Viennese architects want to come to innovative projects with their approach, since the architecture resulting from competitions as well as the profit orientation in the housing construction prevent innovative thinking.
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