While we were searching for a topic for our BA thesis we were deeply influenced by the current Wohnungsfrage discussion and especially by the #Mietenwahnsinn demonstration in the beginning of April. As an initial point for our project we tried to condense all these influences and researches regarding Berlin-specific housing policies in a prologue with the title Housing as Social Infrastructure.
We don’t need another shopping mall!
Our research was mainly focused on the district of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg and especially on the area around Warschauer Straße. For us this area with its obsolete railway plots, industrial inner city sites and various one-storey relics of socialist East Berlin hold great spatial potentials. We hope to save this area from further land speculation and profit-driven developments, that have happened on the Anschutz-Areal around Mercedes-Benz Arena, located just on the other site of the train tracks.
Quite soon we were coming to the conclusion that Berlin needs more socially dedicated housing and for us this means affordable housing in the long term. We believe cooperatives are one plausible answer to the housing question, because their social interests are more important than their commercial interests. We propose the city should work closer together with cooperatives and other socially dedicated communities, buy back inner city plots and let them under a leasehold contract. These cooperatives could develop and curate their buildings while the city stays the owner of the land.
In our project we tried to imagine how such a cooperatively run building should be spatially articulated, for which we defined a certain architectural grammar. With the terms Affordability, Contexture, Communality, Self-regulation, Paradise and Open City we tried to set a textual diagram to frame our design process.
We don’t need another shopping mall!
Our research was mainly focused on the district of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg and especially on the area around Warschauer Straße. For us this area with its obsolete railway plots, industrial inner city sites and various one-storey relics of socialist East Berlin hold great spatial potentials. We hope to save this area from further land speculation and profit-driven developments, that have happened on the Anschutz-Areal around Mercedes-Benz Arena, located just on the other site of the train tracks.
Quite soon we were coming to the conclusion that Berlin needs more socially dedicated housing and for us this means affordable housing in the long term. We believe cooperatives are one plausible answer to the housing question, because their social interests are more important than their commercial interests. We propose the city should work closer together with cooperatives and other socially dedicated communities, buy back inner city plots and let them under a leasehold contract. These cooperatives could develop and curate their buildings while the city stays the owner of the land.
In our project we tried to imagine how such a cooperatively run building should be spatially articulated, for which we defined a certain architectural grammar. With the terms Affordability, Contexture, Communality, Self-regulation, Paradise and Open City we tried to set a textual diagram to frame our design process.
