Jakob Naujack

Social Housing on Jülicher Straße, Aachen

Aachen urgently needs more affordable housing.  To create it and make it available in the long term, land must be acquired and developed on a non-profit basis.  The available land is scarce. Therefore, concrete solutions must be designed now. These homes must be able to accommodate a variety of people and lifestyles. This work negotiates between guidelines & needs & between doors & walls. The result is a porous spatial structure, a house with many rooms of equal size waiting to be inhabited.

The floorpan consists of many rooms of almost equal size. Each flat has a base-set of rooms – an entrance & kitchen, a central communal room & a bathroom. Depending on how many people inhabit the flat, the equivalent number of rooms are added, while always remaining in the given spatial limitations of the regional guidelines.

These rooms are not given a specific function but can rather be inhabited as needed, encouraging different ways of living together. Every wall has an opening so that the entire floor could be connected. This porous structure is filled with either doors or panels, connecting or closing off rooms. According to changing family structures throughout the inhabitants´ lifetimes their flat can grow and shrink with them, given that their neighbors change as well. Otherwise, the homogeneous structure encourages swapping flats, too.

To fully grasp the entire range of issues surrounding social housing, the design is accompanied by fifteen theses, ranging from urban policy to the design of the floor plan.

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