As of: February 28, 2024, 8:00 a.m
By: Dieter Roettig
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At the exhibition opening for “Alternatives to Single Family Homes”: (from left) Riccardo Stellato, Simon Sörgel, Benedikt Sunder-Plassmann, Bettina Sunder-Plassmann, Peter Erhard and Harald Mansi.
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The Wessobrunner Kreis invites you to a partly provocative exhibition in the meeting room of the Wielenbach town hall until March 8th.
The question is whether the German home builder's lifelong dream of having his own four walls is still up to date.
Pähl
- It's time for livable ideas as alternatives to single-family homes, according to the Wessobrunner Circle, founded in 1998, in which architects and those involved in construction work for future-oriented living and environmental planning.
We are all facing major challenges due to resource scarcity, price explosions, climate change, migration and other phenomena.
So said architect Benedikt Sunder-Plassmann, chairman of the district, in his opening speech.
There are 19 million existing buildings in Germany, 16 million of which are single-family and semi-detached houses, mostly with poor energy standards.
After the children move out, the houses are often only occupied by one or two people.
“If we managed to achieve a coexistence of old and young on the same property or in the same building in just 2.5 percent of single-family and semi-detached houses, we would create 400,000 new apartments per year,” says Sunder-Plassmann.
Conversion of use instead of demolition and the energetic renovation of houses with renewable building materials are a benefit for the climate and society.
Many development plans need to be revised
Positive densification is the order of the day.
The outdated development plans of cities and municipalities would have to be revised in order to be able to place additional buildings through clever arrangement.
Examples can be seen on the display boards, such as extensions to existing garages, residential towers for small families or barrier-free pavilions for seniors.
As interior designer Roger Mandl added on his display board, an open landscape the size of around a hundred football fields is being built up every day in Germany through urban sprawl and sealing.
Against the background of this fatal development, he sees a lot of potential in the garage courtyards of the post-war housing estates to create space-saving, affordable and sustainable living spaces with single-family or tiny house quality.
Existing rows of garages could be built over with single-storey prefabricated wooden modules in a way that is family-friendly, ecological and space-saving.
The Falk Schneemann architecture shows an example from Karlsruhe, where twelve new apartments were created by adding floors to three existing garages.
The garages will continue to be used.
Give new, viable ideas a chance
The German family usually wants a detached house on a 500 square meter plot.
Architect Dietfried Gruber shows a resource-saving alternative.
For three- to four-story buildings with apartments of up to 160 square meters, the building land requirement is only 14,800 square meters instead of 41,400 square meters for single-family houses.
According to interior designer Mathias Rathke, semi-detached houses have the greatest use of land for residential purposes, although only 48 percent of them are used.
Rathke sees the modular house as an alternative living typology, based on space-optimized floor areas of 15 square meters each.
It can cover every need from singles to large families.
As Sunder-Plassmann emphasized to the guests such as Mayor Harald Mansi as host and his colleagues Simon Sörgel (Pähl), Peter Erhard (Böbing) and Georg Malterer (Bernried), the examples are suggestions, not patent recipes.
But you have to give new, viable ideas a chance.
Even if you don't make yourself particularly popular with the citizens if you say no to the property for a single-family home, as Mayor Mansi revealed from his own experience.
info
The exhibition in the Wielenbach town hall can be viewed Monday to Thursday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and on Friday from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m.
Admission is free.