Jane Dimacuha
Living bridge - student housing. RWTH Aachen (Germany)
The project is placed in the known university city of Heidelberg.
Explicitly a residential housing for Students has to be designed in an exposed area where both sides of the Neckar River should be bonded.
The specific feature of the task consists in placing a new building above a 150m long existing weir, with its four wind works in the distance of each 40m, and using these as foundations. Therefore a special challenge arises not only concerning the exposure with the existing weirs, but also the creation of apartment-sharing communities for 80 students.
The design is based on putting up one vertical residential housing per wind work instead of laying a long horizontal residential housing atop of all wind works.
The main purpose is to adopt the verticality of the weirs, as well as to remain the view through it, without having a steady barrier.
The building serves as a future oriented high-tech landmark of Heidelberg and stands in contrast to the historical townscape.
Transforming the idea into a building, four equivalent slender residential towers arises, which longitudinal sides adapt themselves to the river course and the weir.
To define the towers of the continuance clearly there is a joint between residential tower and wind work. The lift towers forms the optical spine for the residential towers.
The "light" appearance, outrising towers, appears along and in river direction as discs and crosswise as towers. The form orientates itself by the wind work and becomes rejuvenated in river direction and towards the city.
The already mentioned light-helded construction of the residential housing resulted from a deliberate optical ease of how the towers rises up from the river.
The light appearance of the facade is also carried out on the interior design of the building.
SCHUNCK cannot guarantee the correctness of content and expression. The participants themselves are responsible for their entries. The copyright of the projects underlies to the authors, any reproduction or use of the shown material is strictly forbidden.