Better Affordable Housing
“…the relation between the buildings invites the inhabitants to spontaneously meet one another, once they come home from work and fall into conversation.”
Better Affordable Housing, or in Danish Bedre Billigere Boliger, is an architectural example of how the construction of compact housing can move forward; an example of how people can live together in the future.
Plato’s spatial concept, “Chôra”, where space is understood as a contextual situation of which the residents and the housing complex form part, was the conceptual starting point for Better Affordable Housing. The housing complex is perceived as a scenario within which we, as human beings, are involved as a situation where the space’s existence and qualities are only understood in relation to that which takes up space, including movements and the social life.
Central to Better Affordable Housing is the efforts to create the best possible settings for a thriving and informal neighborhood. With the residents’ interaction in mind, the individual building is predisposed toward situations where inhabitants can come into contact with each other.
In Better Affordable Housing, it is the choreographic features – the paths and entrance bridges – that motivate the interaction between the inhabitants. All movement to and from the apartments takes place through the central squares and the access balconies. Not only do they constitute avenues of access; they also constitute social spaces, with the possibility of informally meeting everyone from the neighbors and the people living across the corridor to visitors from the neighborhood.
“... container park from the outside, but when you get inside, on a sunny day, it’s like an Italian village”
