7 Prototypes for Compact Cities
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Thill, Oliver
Oliver Thill (1971) is an architect from Karl-Marx Stadt, East Germany, who works with Andre Kempe as Atelier Kempe Thill. This lecture is about the continuous investigation of Atelier Kempe Thill on dwellings. Throughout their built works they have tried a wide variety of solutions for collective housing that is flexible, generous and extremely simple. It was given at the EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), at the ''Project Room'', on the 23d of November 2015 and is part of the Fall Semester program of FORM, '' Paris-Tokyo: Metropolis''.
 I'm happy to introduce Oliver Thiel, who of course you all know, or at least most of you do know, because he was teaching here last year, and we thought to make a case for how good he is, it was important to bring him back also this year. And of course that's part of the reason, the other reason is that metropolitan architecture, as we try to figure out what it ever could be, in parallel as you know with the studio project as it is evolving, in parallel with the kind of dialogue with our unit here, the Martin Lamallet unit of the one at the ETH, there's also this third I would say parallel which is of course these four positions, which we hope we have carefully chosen, starting with Christopher and Hedaway trying to figure out what the metropolitan, what they're doing in relationship to the point Paris, Tokyo, to kind of hyper-individual, kind of organized society, and BASC, basically sunrise, perhaps a little bit, and I think it was a very good way to start because you can give a kind of theoretical context if you want of the studio, which we could either take or leave. Then we had of course François Charmonnet who showed this, any idiosyncratic machine-like architecture which we felt somehow was touching upon the more high-tech-like of desires we might have here in the studio, and I think he very much engaged in that. We had Fabricio Balabio maybe as from a historian's perspective, young historian's perspective, introducing this strategy of San Felicier and how he, San Felicier himself almost with only one device, and I think the word device here would probably appropriate this particular kind of shared staircase was able to transform an idea of somehow individual collective of these big building blocks in Paris, and so we end with Oliver, and why Oliver? Because we think that he's personally, and of course together with Andre, the one only architect today who's able to resolve the problem of housing in an interesting way, and that exactly because they tried to be as uninteresting as possible. So for that reason we thought that was probably close to what we could understand as metropolitan architecture in housing, something like or something closest to I would say an oxymoron. So I leave the word to Oliver. Thanks. Okay, good afternoon, Fikir and much for the invitation, and I don't know exactly how much time I have, but I have to start at about an hour, so I will do it relatively quick. So and the issue I would like to talk today is a bit about the way how we let's say work on housing, and what you see already is that compact cities in Europe, something else than Asia, but we are very much as an office interested in the production of prototypical solutions because we think it's a bit of a strange idea to try to make interesting architecture. It's I think much more interesting to try to work on a certain topic and try to see architecture as a sort of product, especially in housing. I think very interesting because the question is always in housing, how can you produce with a limited amount of means, a sort of maximum of quality? And we are all aware that the means are limited, but the question is what means quality nowadays? But before I start, I just want to show you a little bit what we do more in the office, your office in Rotterdam, we have quite international team, and let's say the issue we are dealing with is always the question how can you combine the, let's say the cheapness of 21st century with the rich history of our profession, and that's a sort of a daily question in the work of the office, and in the last years we have been working on, let's say, a couple of public commissions, so in different, let's say, conditions, this is a new building in Austria for concert hall, that we do also quite a lot of transformation of historical monuments, and sometimes also myths, and in the moment we work, let's say, more for, especially in universities, and also several big scale school buildings, and also transformations of existing buildings in existing contexts. And when I talk about housing, to be honest, I'm not a big fan of housing, because I think when you are an architect, or let's say as an architect, I think that I always wonder if housing, at the end, belongs to the world of architecture, because the fact when you think what is architecture, architecture should be, with proportion should be with space, and should be with, let's say, the precise use of materials, and when you look at housing you find out that this is very difficult, because the issue of proportion is not really an issue in housing, very often you have already predefined the solutions that you have to use, it's basically adding, and we see all this housing a little bit more as a sort of social service, but also social services somehow okay, because I think you have an education and at least you can offer something to normal people, because you think it's quite okay to try to do something for ordinary people. And in a way, I mean housing is a very political issue, especially for us, because we grow up in the East, and in the East, in Eastern Europe, I mean housing was always, I would say, something where you could show the future, was the materialization of the dream of the future, and very often I mean this dream was not so exciting at the end, but what we see at the moment, because it affected Europe, a lot of cities are growing at the moment, that there is more of a theme of housing at the moment, and we see that the issue of housing is becoming more and more political again somehow. And let's say when we were kids, we always were wondering about the poor quality of contemporary housing in the 70s, and we always had the idea of a, when we were architect we could make something different, and you get a bit older, you find out, okay, you look again on a photo like this and you think, maybe not so bad, it's done with someone, and what is really confusing is that the issue of contemporary housing is very confusing, because there are a lot of contradictions, and we have somehow as architects to deal with this kind of contradiction, and I just made a sort of simple list when we have to deal with, and you see, for instance, the relation between ecology and economy, for instance, is an interesting one, or specific, or neutral, but also individuality and collectivities. There are a lot of these kind of themes that are somehow at the core of the development of interesting housing solutions, and I would like to show you, or whatever you do now, I just quickly show you some particular solutions, and I included also, you see, the last issue, the refurbishment of slab housing does not really belong to the prototype thing, but it's also an issue I would like shortly to mention. I mean, the first project is, and that's I think a very Dutch one, in a way, is a project for strip housing in Amsterdam, and let's say the reason why we are interested in housing, and that's actually, by the way, a diagram of the city of Geneva is the question that, I mean, as an architect, you always look for possibilities, and as I already said, there is a moment's need for housing at the moment, because production was too low in the last decades, so that means there is a lot to do, you can survive, and there's maybe also the possibility to invent something, because it's always like that, and the pressure is high enough, and there's also space block. But it's not only about production, I think, let's say what we think is an important issue when you look at, let's say, the European condition, that you see, I mean, the last since the 50s, the development of European cities was very much defined by the development of suburbia, so that means the main cities didn't grow anymore, people moved to the countryside, 50 kilometres away from the house, and they were going every day by car to the city centre, and you see that this lifestyle seems to be over, because people cannot afford any more two cars, both partners have to work, because you cannot live off the salary of only one partner, and it means that suburbia is in Europe nowadays very much under pressure, and a lot of people move from the countryside back into the city centre, and that you see actually everywhere, you see the Hamburg, Cologne, Antwerp, Brussels, and so on. That's the thing, and the question is for us, let's say, what our point is, we'd like to make this, that a lot of people that come back to the city centres have this kind of suburban lifestyle, so they bring in also new expectations, so they don't want to live in an existence minimum housing, they need to have something else, and the question is, how can you implement suburban qualities into the city centres? And I'd say we worked in the last years on a couple of these kind of projects, and for us, as I already said, the combination of economy and ecology is a very tough one, and seeing the fact that there is very limited economic means, we always use, I would say, 1950s strategies from offices like Atelier 5, where you say, okay, we just try to work with a smaller span, and try to make a deep plan, reduce the amount of facade surface, like that we can realise a bit higher quality, and we have a bit of cluster for public situation, and we just try to, let's say, open the situation by bringing in a lot of light into the structure, by using a lot of glass, and by making holes in the floor, and introducing board spaces, so very simple, I mean you can see the TASB, really cool, these kind of stuff, so it is a very, I would say, modernistic strategy, and if somebody I would like to show is a housing project in Amsterdam, a couple of years, and the issue was here to remove an existing apartment building, to build 23 townhouses, and we organised the houses in a way that we could find a clever solution for the parking, because, as I said, the problem we have in Holland, we cannot afford the parking garage for terrace housing, but we had to realise that the houses in the building were not completely on the ground floor, on the street side, and you cannot park on the street anymore, because you drive in houses actually, not so smart, and what we did was we turned the driving in house, kind of H&D grays around, so we had to put the street on the backside, then we park on the backside of the house, so it means we have a free facade towards the street, and we have, let's say, a kitchen on the ground floor and living room on the first floor, we combined both with a void, and we basically offered two different outside spaces, you have a bit more collective garden at the front side, and you have a private terrace on the backside on top of the parking garage, so it's quite simple in a way, you see it also in the floor plans, so it's very straightforward, and in our way of working we are, let's say, also very much inspired by this kind of modernistic attitude, but also that what we learned in East Germany at the school, so it's very much based on a sort of rationalistic approach, so trying to make good foundations very clear, trying to set up a very clear skeleton, and just fill the skeleton with apartments, and we work a lot of, with prefabricated elements, because when you work with repetition, then you can use prefab, and prefab is very often in terms of quality, better than, and people do the work on site, and then you see how people check them out, you see very rigid structure, so basically you can still see the construction that we like a lot, as a sort of basis for the organization of the houses, and one of the problems we are suffering a lot in housing is the fact that I already mentioned that it's not really architecture, so you have to introduce very often some clumsy tricks to keep the things together, and especially when you see from urban and metropolitan parts of the view that what we did here as well is that we had an aluminium system for the facades, it was the best way to do these facades, but we had to use for the head-facade steel plates, because they were cheaper and more stable than aluminium, and on the backside we had to use, or we could use wooden windows, because the windows were a bit smaller, and then the question is how you bring all these kind of weird materials together, and you can make a brilliant collage when we don't like so much collage, because you are looking more for something that forms really a sort of more stable entity, and at the end we decided to paint everything white, because it was the only way to keep these mix of materials somehow together, but then with all the authority that was invented in the night before, and the buildings by Schinkel, for instance, you see very often that the classicism already at that time was a very shingling, and let's say talking a bit about suburban qualities you can see here on the east side of the facade, what's the park, these kind of big terraces that still bring in a little bit suburbia into the city, and you see the most surprising space in the entire project, parking garage, and you see that even if the house is all small, the inside measure is 4 meters or 50, that it's still light and open, and quite nice place. And what we do quite often in these housing projects is that we, in terms of building physics, it's always not so easy, but you tune quite a lot to get building permissions to build these apartments like that, but very often at the end, two years later, we make, we send people a letter and just ask them about the houses just to find out if the things work like expected, and we do that for two reasons. One reason is you can learn a bit if the calculations and the expectations you had are right, but on the other hand, it's also super smart in the discussion with the clients, because very often the clients pretend that they know everything, and if you show something like that, then they say, okay, fuck it. And you can have really a sort of clear argumentation why people like certain things, and we all always have this kind of fascination for the production of these neutral grey, broad solutions, and we were very happy that this project was included in the new, because it fits very much into our way of thinking too. And at the moment we do a new low scale housing project quite compact, even more compact actually by the way in Hanhainmen, and the real construction is installed next month. The next thing I would like to show was a sort of study commission we had for the City of Groningen, but I think it was an interesting question, that's why I would like to show the project here, because the City of Groningen is a city in the north of Holland with about 100,000 inhabitants, and they decided okay, we need a bit more compact city, we don't want to have really a lot of growth on the outside, but they noticed that people were not so interested to live in apartment buildings, because they have a lot of apartments buildings and they said if you want to attract people, or if you want to convince people to stay in the city, we have to offer more individualized housing in high density. And that was an interesting question, and also a bit typical for Holland, because I only see these questions quite often, and they had quite a nice side close to the city centre, and the question they had was actually quite insane, because they said, yeah, when you look on the diagram on the left hand side, you see the normal density of the raised housing in the States in Europe, it's about 35, 40, 30 houses per hectare, that's maximum. And then they said, yeah, actually what we want is basically the double, so they said we want to have low rise housing, but with double density, and then you come up with the diagram, the second diagram, and then you see the distance between the houses is so small that you cannot imagine any more people could live there, and then we tried to find the organization how to manage, and what we actually proposed was a sort of double building block, also not something that was completely new, because I think in Amsterdam in the 1920s you have already housing projects using a similar system, and the interesting thing was that we, let's say with this kind of housing problem, we could make terraced houses, and the ring on the outside was orientated to the park, and the ring on the inside would be oriented towards a courtyard, and it produced this section, so we made the houses on the outer ring a bit bigger and on the smaller ring a bit smaller, with an interior straight, six meters wide, and that was actually the model we produced, and you see a little bit of how that could work, and so the distance between the block was about 25 meters, and we see the zone that we used for the access of the apartment, six meters wide, and actually we tried quite hard to do it, so we actually had two projects where we tried to make it with one where we were already very close, but then we actually, then it was cancelled, it was a bit, it's a bit of a pity, but it was quite, let's say as an issue, it was quite interesting, and let's say this kind of typology was also in terms of, let's say how you look on it, actually interesting because you don't know anymore, do we talk about terraced housing or do we talk about apartments, and it was in terms of interpretation of the government rules, interesting one, and because of that it was also interesting to talk, do we talk about energy we don't know anymore, is this facade here, is it really outside or is it already inside, so we also, let's say this kind of typology also offers, let's say some possibilities for energy efficient solutions. The next project I would like to show is the typology of the tower block, and you can look at the project in this wall, so the north of Amsterdam, and for us, let's say looking back on the development of architecture in the 20th century, we are always very much fascinated by this image, because of the difference we notice, because when you look back on the Popesier, then Popesier proposed the Maison Domino as a radical solution for housing, so we have floors, we have columns, and we have staircase that formed somehow the basis, and then he started with architecture, so you always use that system, it was more or less given for him, and then he started to design, design facades and board spaces and so on, and now in our case if it's different, let's say we see it not so much as the basis to design, but we see it actually as architecture, so we think that maybe, especially when you have no money, this is maybe already enough, and especially when you go to the south, to Greece, or to southern Italy, or to Egypt, and so on, you see this system very often as the basis principle for the production of housing, and we think there's a lot of quality in it, because you have, you see there's a sort of freedom, you can imagine very different kind of uses, and we think that's an interesting quality that an architect would have that you don't offer a fixed solution, but you offer basically freedom, and this is also to do with the next image, because I mean in the 1920s, architects tried to, let's say, produce with their design, a lot of freedom for the inhabitants, and they proposed a certain lightness of, I think this lightness somehow became reality, because the Bauhaus turned directly into Ikea, and AI and GC, even in Europe, I mean the lifestyle is becoming more and more light, and people become more and more flexible, and I think the difference between housing and office, for instance, is not so clear anymore as it was 100 years ago, and now coming back to the tower block, I mean if we have the chance, I think we like the tower block very much, because of the fact that the tower block is a very efficient typology, and whenever we have the chance to design or propose a tower block like a Comgie, we do it because we know that in terms of, let's say, price, quality relation, we can produce relatively okay designs with it, and let's say the strategy we use is again the search of the 50s, I would say, and where, let's say, we try to make deep floor plans, we try to organize the apartments all along on the edges, we put the access in the middle of the block, so we have again a bit of a claustrophobic basis, and we try to break this claustrophobic situation by opening the facade to the maximum, and we continue in a relatively straightforward way in this housing project in small, and it's a mix of 50%, student housing, 50% social housing, and we particularly like that project very much because you can read in this project two tendencies, on one hand it's very much inspired by our love for rationalistic architectures, when you close your eyes you can still see a little bit of Adwasi and Umos, a little bit of meese, but on the other hand when you look on the, let's say, especially on these kind of situations, then you see also that we are belonging a bit to the post-punk generation, so we like also very much this kind of anarchy in these projects, that there is a sort of freedom that you can do, that people have a sort of freedom to do something they want, and that the facade is not, let's say, an element that regulates the relation between outside and inside, but in that case more a sort of interface, let's say, where you have a sort of screen and you can, you could say, adapt the screen to your personal wishes. The project is actually very simple and organized, and the good thing was that we had even a little space over in the middle of the clock, so we could introduce a void through the Google app, and you can see here, actually, that's the void, and on the ground floor we made a double entrance hall, very similar, and then you get to this section, that is in reality quite amazing because you come, you see the building project, and from the outside you don't expect that there is a sort of bigger space that is open in the inside, and there are again a lot of repetition that we try to work relatively close together with the industry to find out on one end how they think, and on the other hand get a low price for the product to be used, and it's in the beginning of, in the beginning it was quite an investment you do, but you sort of normally build up certain knowledge, and with the knowledge you become more so read quicker, and you see a little bit of the content, and the interesting thing, let's say, about this project was that it was built for relatively ordinary budget for social housing, and it's a lot better than this stuff, you know, we get it, and what you can like here in this project, you can open 50% of the facility, and it means that the project in winter looks quite emetic, while in summer a lot of things, and the windows are open with dialogue with the surrounding, and let's say when you enter you see here these entrance walls, and then you come to the normal floor, so when you leave to live you see this kind of situation, as you can see, I mean in social housing there is not much money, so it was also for us very painful to design this project, because the concrete you see is not in situ concrete, it's just ordinary concrete you get, and just very lighting, very cheap steel handrails, and acoustic ceiling, and but still I think it's very, very good, and it was at least interesting to offer a little space to the people who share together, and when you come there, because especially it's student housing, there's a lot of things going on in the corridors, and it's quite, it's quite, and what we like very much is that, let's say looking back on the history of modern housing architecture, that when the East was the old building in 1930 to 2010 housing was heavily attacked, and because the other people were pretending it was possible to live there, and but nowadays you see that the loft became very much common sense, so when you go to whatever bookshop in the countryside, they had always at least three or five books about lofts somewhere in Vietnam, and the only question is what we have nowadays, how can we afford this kind of housing, and we're very happy that we could, let's say, make these kind of apartments, they are 100 square meters, and you could pay, you think, 540 euro per month for these houses, and it's, let's say, for Holland quite amazing that you can get that kind of quality. And the next project is the project in The Hague, again about strip housing, but this time about, this is a gallery, and it's a talking about housing is also really strange, because on one hand, we always say minimalism is not a choice, because you see that when you look back on production of architecture, that money became less and less, it's less to design, and we can hardly, let's say, in New Zealand, this project does not so much design than because you see everything on standard products, and you just put them in and that's it, and you see that as sort of global tendency, so you take ever very cheapest product and the housing project is finished, but on the other hand, you also wonder where the money disappeared, and we experience actually very clear in this housing project, it's, on the side was a housing block by the famous Dutch architect, Udoch, and housing corporation decided to knock the block down, and because they couldn't renovate it, because the opponents were keeping our fence on, our flexible fence on, and the strange thing was that they asked to rebuild the same amount of houses, but actually the size of the entire project was the double size of the housing project of Udoch, but that leaves half of the people then in the 50s, so that means within 60 years time, everything was growing by factor four, but it's really insane, but this also, let's say, describes the other side of the area, it became so rich that within 60 years, we could go from 12 and a half square meter per person to 50, and in the 50s they had maybe for these 100 houses, they had maybe 10 cars in our day, and so it was quite tough to do that, and at the end we used a lot of know-how from the project I showed in Austol to find a solution for the parking, and we set the project up as two parallel strips, and in the slab we had on the ground floor mezzanet housing, so we made a dupe access at the ground floor level, and on the upper floors we could not avoid the gallery access apartments, but we don't like not very much, because you know that you have obviously a little bit of privacy problem, especially if the apartment is only on ground floor, but it was actually the only way to manage within the costs, we don't also something about sustainability, because the strange thing is that the project was so big that we could use geodynamic insulation, and by that we understood that insulating the facades is not, let's say, so important to put these machines in, because when you have these machines you can save so much energy that you can do with the facades where you want them, so sometimes, and that's why we also think that the issue of sustainability should be solved on the urban level and not with the architecture, because it's far too complicated, and you see how the project works, again, repetition, and the big entrance in the middle, and in that way, in this particular detail, for the first time the facade is more or less independent from the structure, and the interesting thing was because of the fact that the project is quite big, we could also put the guys from the industry a bit under pressure, because everybody wanted to do it, and that had actually two advantages, the first was that we could rebuild a big mock-up of one of the facade elements, because the housing project was used for elderly people, and the client was a bit nervous of the combination of sliding doors and elderly people, and then we had the mock-up, and then we rented a bus from the elderly organization, went there with 20 of elderly people, and then they tested the facade, and because of the fact that these elderly people are very often quite modernistic in mind, they were very enthusiastic, and the client could say, okay, we do it, if the people can deal with it, and they like it, we do, and the other thing was that because of the fact that we used a lot of aluminium, we could redesign the aluminium profiles the way we wanted, and just to get a bit more elegant and fascinating. And another issue was because of the fact that the project was very big, we could use the 70s technology, the famous tunnel construction, and by doing so we also could reuse the costs because of the construction of the entire project could be built for only three months, it normally takes six months because of that, and we tried to use the construction again as a direct basis for the organization of the apartment and tried to make it within the construction of the rooms. The funny thing was that the organization was a little bit afraid of our anarchistic facade and then they said, okay, and we have also a bit of money over, so we give you even money for curtains, so the curtains belong, let's say, to the facade, so when you rent an apartment, you have to rent it with these curtains, but you have a second way where you can put your personal clothes, and here you see the outlooks in detail, and the facade is transparent, there are curtains, you see the terraces on the first floor without plans, and then the galleries on the upper floors, and this is something very Dutch, we tried to make the gallery a bit wider and to give people the opportunity to occupy a part of the gallery, and Dutch people do that because it just becomes very much a Dutch culture, and it's okay for them, I think. And you see a bit the interior, so you have a loft-like situation, and on the ground floor you have a mezzanette housing, and you see a bit of the curtains work, and we built at the moment in Antwerp, a civil law project, but then for, let's say, for the free model, it's a quite expensive apartment, and it's actually the first time that we can use a sort of prefabricated concrete facade, so we have panels from up to 4x4 meters, so we are very close to what our friends in Switzerland do, like, you know, in Dino, and we could, and if even in Belgium it's complicated, but we could do that because we are at the moment economic crisis in Holland, and we could find a Dutch company that was willing to do it, and really transport all the stuff from Holland to Belgium, and we are in Berlin, next month, and the interesting thing is that I talked at the beginning a little bit about suburbia, you may hear apartments that are 120 square meter surfaced, and they have a 60 square meter outside space in form of winter gardens, so that means that there are a lot of elderly people that bought their house, and they basically bring their garden into the city centre, and you can see a photograph of the terrace, so they are all between 10 and 12 meters, and then 2 and a half meters deep, and you can open them up, and you have them on both sides, so it's quite nice, so we are actually extremely happy that that happened, because my partner was working on the approaching, and I always made jokes about it, and said, you will never make that, it will be impossible, and the moment was so quick, and that really happened, so it was quite, we were really lucky, and we just recently won another competition in Germany, where we do, we all, again, work with the gallery, but this time in combination with Duplex, where we try to really make family houses in high density, and we hope that we can build it soon. The next project I would like to show is a bit strange one, because it's not really housing, it's something, yeah, between housing and hotel, it's a sort of project for heroin addicted in Amsterdam, and we are very much inspired also by the issue of healthcare, just because of the fact that the European population is getting older and older, it will change a lot, let's say, the architecture, and I think there are really new solutions for housing possible, because you can suffer from it, you can say, fuck, we have to do only wheelchair and so on, but I think also the level of typology, this will be used in types of housing, because we need much more flexibility and higher ability of a partner project, and we already from the beginning of the office proposed it, because we had a very poor idea to say, okay, we offer a sort of very simple loft-like basis, and then we say, okay, we can use this for filling in apartments in different size or office spaces, but nobody was really interested, and it had just simply to do with the fact that the market for housing and the market for offices is completely separate, it's a people with new housing, most people with new offices, and by the issue, but what is interesting that in the whole healthcare world, this is becoming closer to never, and the issue of flexibility, people also understand that they have to build more flexible structures, and the project we built in Amsterdam was actually organized very simple, it's a sort of a Scottish plan based on a grid structure with commas, so we can basically, if they want it, so they can take out the complete interior and make a new arrangement, and then we have only one floor, and that's it, and so we have a very simple structure, it's based on commas, and because of the fact that we had to do a lot of smaller spaces, and all the spaces wanted to find a place on the facade, we had on the inside always a little bit of a sort of mod, because we had to fill this Spanish box, it was given in the end of the plan, so we proposed to make a big living room in the middle of the project, and there were some specific conditions regarding the estate, because the heroin addicts in the house were not allowed to open the window, so we had to design basically a building like a refrigerator, and we also were wondering what that would mean for the facade, and we quickly found out that we could not afford structural buildings, so we used a sort of alternative system to fix the glass panels, that was quite typical for our way of working, because we talked to a company that was specialized in that, and then we said, okay, we can fold this kind of aluminium plates to fix the glass, but we said, actually we don't want the deceased building, but we want to have them extruded, and the guy said, yeah, you know, we'll only take 1,500 kilos of aluminium, and if you want to extrude them, I mean it's only visible if it only worked with 3 different profiles, and then we had a guy in the office who was, I would say, free for that, and I said, 2 guys, I said, hey, come on, we should try to do it with 3 profiles, can you do it, and then they made the design of the profiles, and basically we made the detail where we have one vertical, but they don't see, but we have those 2 profiles, and you see it up on the top, we turned them around, so we have only these 3 elements, and by that we could, let's say, make this facade, especially produced profiles, very slimmer, only like 5 centimetres, and we had a discussion with the housing corporations about this band, because they wanted to make a facade with bands, and the grid was not visible, they didn't want to have outside insulation, and then the question was what to do, and then we said, okay, maybe we can use a system with glass tiles, and the glass tiles were far too expensive, especially when you use the Italian ones, and then we went on the Alibaba tour, so we found a company in Amsterdam that, let's say, imported glass tiles from China, and with FedEx you could negotiate it with these guys, we could always more cups and more, and then at the end we brought the tiles in China for, I think, 20% of the price of the Italian ones, and then it's really, let's say, that you only do because of the pressure, because the economic pressure is so strong that it was the only way to get it done at the end, you see the third facade, the courtyard on the top, and then you need to do the space in the middle, and how it is used, and again the facade, I say this is separated from the structure, we're using this kind of strange space, and we have quite a lot, and we especially like the honest mile way of living of the inhabitants, because they really have nothing you just take what you find on the street and live there, and it's quite inspiring somehow, and actually it's a work with similar typologies, also in our projects we are working on a house there, a village in Heist of Kubea in Belgium, where we do elderly housing, where we use atrium for different collective uses, and we also worked a couple of years ago on the project for student housing, where we try to step different kind of, these kind of spaces to let's say separate or indicate different communities within the world. At a certain moment the Dutch economy was very, started to become very bad, I think in 2009 or something, and then we said, okay, the housing market completely collapsed, because there were too much houses, and we said, okay, we have to export our knowledge of housing, if you want to survive that was very simple, this is going to be a question, but you also find out that you have to adapt to different local building cultures, because in Europe there is not one building or living culture, because when you look on every country there are always things that are different, and this is one of our first housing projects abroad, in terms of parents, and it's also against the housing, when we here proposed to work with Wintergarten as a basis for the organization of the house, because we like Wintergarten quite a lot, because they, especially in urban situations, they can function as a sort of plant proper, but they also very often have a sort of noise protection function, and they can give also a little bit more privacy on housing spaces, and especially in this project it was quite important, because we are very close to the Boulevard Territory in Norma, and we had to do two very small urban buildings, because it was not possible to change the design of the building, and it was very often told, and a lot of countries told me, the urbanists basically define what they have to design, and then at the end you come and you find out there's not so much to design anymore, because everything is defined by the urbanists, and actually it should be the other way around, the architects should define the design, and we proposed two blocks with public functions on the ground floor, and Wintergarten on the top, and you see the typical French floor plan, we could not really avoid, we see here extremely small, nasty staircase, we can see all housing property in Paris, and again you have this typical housing type of cheese for France, called T1, T2, T3, and T4, we got basically 80% of the city of built with the same type of housing, it's actually a very horrible idea, and the only difference let's say we offered was the fact that we said okay, we have to accept it, we cannot escape from it, and the only thing we had to say was okay, what we had to do is we make a balcony all around, we make the balcony deeper, and we make it double-hasseed, and by that you have a sort of winter apartment, we tried to make the apartments as open as possible to let's say transform this different situation in something that we could accept, because there was not a moment to reinvent something new, and what was interesting was that we were very much focusing on the building method, French clients were completely irritated with what we were doing, so we were really very much trying to pre-define already how the builders had to build to get the project into costs, we tuned quite a lot, but at the end we could let's say manage, and we made actually apartments that are far more open than they usually are, and there are I think also including the battle than what you normally find on the housing model, so we have this kind of balcony all around, we have a double layer for noise protection, climate protection, and the projects in moment under construction, we actually also really shopped about the quality in France, because in France you can really see what 30 years of neoliberalism means to Europe, it means that at the end you really want where people on the building side know what you do, because the knowledge is so cool that there has been a difference between North Africa and let's say France is not existing anymore, in terms of quality we have also brought in Morocco, it's really the same, we were really shocked let's say, how that, let's say, about the reality on the building side, but okay we managed, and this is a photograph from two weeks ago, so the blocks are on the way of completion, and you see that the facade with the outside layer of the winter gardens, and we are really looking forward to the results. The last project I would like to show is, it's not really a typology, but it is a sort of a thing, when you talk about metropolitan housing, a thing was very important, because it's the issue of refurbishment of the common ensemble, because what we see is that, I think since the 17th we see already the percentage of transformation projects is growing like hell, while the new projects are really going down, especially in Holland, I think the peak was in the 1970s, they built in Holland 250,000 apartments per year, and at the moment they talk about coming boom, so it's going a little bit better, and they talk now about building 40,000 apartments, so you see that the production since the last 40 years really went down by 8%, 70%, while transformation is becoming more and more issue, for a few reasons, but also for sustainability, and there's also the new gas, the new empty estates, in terms of techniques, and problems to tackle, but refurbishment means nowadays also something else than in the past, because it was relatively easy to renovate the building and even adapt to new conditions, but nowadays we see there are a lot of norms and regulations that become stronger and stronger, and they are not only for new buildings, but also for existing ones, and what we see is the gap between what the government wants and what you can do is becoming bigger and bigger, and there's pressure for these kind of projects, and in the office we do from time to time this kind of refurbishment, we more or less by accident got the 2002 commission for the refurbishment of 800 apartments in Holland, and it was for us a very disappointing project on one hand, because we couldn't do it so little, but on the other hand we learned really a lot by doing it, so it was a sort of quite tough school to work on that project, and what I would like to show quickly is a project we do at the moment in Antwerp, where we could lose a lot of knowledge from the past, and we can go much further than we could go in the project we just showed, and this is a project for the refurbishment of two slag buildings, and they are from the 1970s, and they completely run down, and actually the housing corporation wanted to knock them down, but then they found out that when they were knocked down, they could only build up to four floors, and they said, no, no, no, we should keep them, because otherwise we cannot build enough houses, and the houses have quite some problems in terms of how the access is organized, because it's really strange, because this is the front side of your apartments, but the access is basically on the backside, hardly to be seen from the outside, and it's very social, quite tricky, and the galleries have closed other streets, but your apartments have actually quite a nice view on the landscape, and what we actually do is very simple, just shoot some diagrams, so we have in the buildings a floor plan, somehow like that, and what we do is we demolish the entire interior, we take everything out, but we also demolish the staircase, and the stairs, to organize that a little bit in a more logical way, so what we actually keep, the only thing we keep is the skeleton, and then we put new floors on the facade of the building, by doing so we can orientate the entrance halls towards the street, and we put balconies on the east side all around the block, and by doing so we can give the apartment also a big outside space, what it doesn't have in the moment, and what we like quite a lot is the next step, by doing that we can even take out, we can even change the construction, so we take out the concrete walls that are necessary for the stability, because we put them now on the outside, so we take out these walls, and we put those ones, but we do it in two steps, so we bit force the core and then take it out, because our walls are structured, collapse, and then we get the relatively flexible basis in between, and we fill in different types of housing according to these stupid regulations that they have to use, that again offer not so much freedom, and now that's actually the situation at the moment, so they're just on the way to removing everything, and we are super enthusiastic, because you see that demolition can be also quite funny, and what we do is that we wrap the facades with glass balconies and a lot of glass plates, you see the new entrance walls towards the street, and the apartments on the ground floor, the exit from the street, and then you see the balconies on the upper floors, we see the detailing of the entrance situation, and the adaption of the galleries, and the interior, new interior of the apartments with glass balconies, and this is another project where we actually have a completely different situation here, we basically try to keep everything that's made for this, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
 I'm happy to introduce Oliver Thiel, who of course you all know, or at least most of  you do know, because he was teaching here last year, and we thought to make a case for  how good he is, it was important to bring him back also this year.  And of course that's part of the reason, the other reason is that metropolitan architecture,  as we try to figure out what it ever could be, in parallel as you know with the studio  project as it is evolving, in parallel with the kind of dialogue with our unit here, the  Martin Lamallet unit of the one at the ETH, there's also this third I would say parallel  which is of course these four positions, which we hope we have carefully chosen, starting  with Christopher and Hedaway trying to figure out what the metropolitan, what they're doing  in relationship to the point Paris, Tokyo, to kind of hyper-individual, kind of organized  society, and BASC, basically sunrise, perhaps a little bit, and I think it was a very good  way to start because you can give a kind of theoretical context if you want of the studio,  which we could either take or leave.  Then we had of course François Charmonnet who showed this, any idiosyncratic machine-like  architecture which we felt somehow was touching upon the more high-tech-like of desires we  might have here in the studio, and I think he very much engaged in that.  We had Fabricio Balabio maybe as from a historian's perspective, young historian's perspective,  introducing this strategy of San Felicier and how he, San Felicier himself almost with  only one device, and I think the word device here would probably appropriate this particular  kind of shared staircase was able to transform an idea of somehow individual collective of  these big building blocks in Paris, and so we end with Oliver, and why Oliver?  Because we think that he's personally, and of course together with Andre, the one only  architect today who's able to resolve the problem of housing in an interesting way, and that  exactly because they tried to be as uninteresting as possible.  So for that reason we thought that was probably close to what we could understand as metropolitan  architecture in housing, something like or something closest to I would say an oxymoron.  So I leave the word to Oliver.  Thanks.  Okay, good afternoon, Fikir and much for the invitation, and I don't know exactly how much  time I have, but I have to start at about an hour, so I will do it relatively quick.  So and the issue I would like to talk today is a bit about the way how we let's say work  on housing, and what you see already is that compact cities in Europe, something else than  Asia, but we are very much as an office interested in the production of prototypical solutions  because we think it's a bit of a strange idea to try to make interesting architecture.  It's I think much more interesting to try to work on a certain topic and try to see  architecture as a sort of product, especially in housing.  I think very interesting because the question is always in housing, how can you produce  with a limited amount of means, a sort of maximum of quality?  And we are all aware that the means are limited, but the question is what means quality nowadays?  But before I start, I just want to show you a little bit what we do more in the office,  your office in Rotterdam, we have quite international team, and let's say the issue we are dealing  with is always the question how can you combine the, let's say the cheapness of 21st century  with the rich history of our profession, and that's a sort of a daily question in the work  of the office, and in the last years we have been working on, let's say, a couple of public  commissions, so in different, let's say, conditions, this is a new building in Austria  for concert hall, that we do also quite a lot of transformation of historical monuments,  and sometimes also myths, and in the moment we work, let's say, more for, especially in  universities, and also several big scale school buildings, and also transformations of existing  buildings in existing contexts.  And when I talk about housing, to be honest, I'm not a big fan of housing, because I think  when you are an architect, or let's say as an architect, I think that I always wonder  if housing, at the end, belongs to the world of architecture, because the fact when you  think what is architecture, architecture should be, with proportion should be with space,  and should be with, let's say, the precise use of materials, and when you look at housing  you find out that this is very difficult, because the issue of proportion is not really  an issue in housing, very often you have already predefined the solutions that you have to  use, it's basically adding, and we see all this housing a little bit more as a sort of  social service, but also social services somehow okay, because I think you have an education  and at least you can offer something to normal people, because you think it's quite okay  to try to do something for ordinary people.  And in a way, I mean housing is a very political issue, especially for us, because we grow  up in the East, and in the East, in Eastern Europe, I mean housing was always, I would  say, something where you could show the future, was the materialization of the dream of the  future, and very often I mean this dream was not so exciting at the end, but what we see  at the moment, because it affected Europe, a lot of cities are growing at the moment,  that there is more of a theme of housing at the moment, and we see that the issue of housing  is becoming more and more political again somehow.  And let's say when we were kids, we always were wondering about the poor quality of contemporary  housing in the 70s, and we always had the idea of a, when we were architect we could  make something different, and you get a bit older, you find out, okay, you look again  on a photo like this and you think, maybe not so bad, it's done with someone, and what  is really confusing is that the issue of contemporary housing is very confusing, because there  are a lot of contradictions, and we have somehow as architects to deal with this kind of contradiction,  and I just made a sort of simple list when we have to deal with, and you see, for instance,  the relation between ecology and economy, for instance, is an interesting one, or specific,  or neutral, but also individuality and collectivities.  There are a lot of these kind of themes that are somehow at the core of the development  of interesting housing solutions, and I would like to show you, or whatever you do now,  I just quickly show you some particular solutions, and I included also, you see, the last issue,  the refurbishment of slab housing does not really belong to the prototype thing, but  it's also an issue I would like shortly to mention.  I mean, the first project is, and that's I think a very Dutch one, in a way, is a project  for strip housing in Amsterdam, and let's say the reason why we are interested in housing,  and that's actually, by the way, a diagram of the city of Geneva is the question that,  I mean, as an architect, you always look for possibilities, and as I already said, there  is a moment's need for housing at the moment, because production was too low in the last  decades, so that means there is a lot to do, you can survive, and there's maybe also the  possibility to invent something, because it's always like that, and the pressure is high  enough, and there's also space block.  But it's not only about production, I think, let's say what we think is an important issue  when you look at, let's say, the European condition, that you see, I mean, the last  since the 50s, the development of European cities was very much defined by the development  of suburbia, so that means the main cities didn't grow anymore, people moved to the countryside,  50 kilometres away from the house, and they were going every day by car to the city centre,  and you see that this lifestyle seems to be over, because people cannot afford any more  two cars, both partners have to work, because you cannot live off the salary of only one  partner, and it means that suburbia is in Europe nowadays very much under pressure, and a lot  of people move from the countryside back into the city centre, and that you see actually  everywhere, you see the Hamburg, Cologne, Antwerp, Brussels, and so on.  That's the thing, and the question is for us, let's say, what our point is, we'd like  to make this, that a lot of people that come back to the city centres have this kind of  suburban lifestyle, so they bring in also new expectations, so they don't want to live  in an existence minimum housing, they need to have something else, and the question is,  how can you implement suburban qualities into the city centres?  And I'd say we worked in the last years on a couple of these kind of projects, and for  us, as I already said, the combination of economy and ecology is a very tough one, and  seeing the fact that there is very limited economic means, we always use, I would say,  1950s strategies from offices like Atelier 5, where you say, okay, we just try to work  with a smaller span, and try to make a deep plan, reduce the amount of facade surface,  like that we can realise a bit higher quality, and we have a bit of cluster for public situation,  and we just try to, let's say, open the situation by bringing in a lot of light into the structure,  by using a lot of glass, and by making holes in the floor, and introducing board spaces,  so very simple, I mean you can see the TASB, really cool, these kind of stuff, so it is  a very, I would say, modernistic strategy, and if somebody I would like to show is a housing  project in Amsterdam, a couple of years, and the issue was here to remove an existing  apartment building, to build 23 townhouses, and we organised the houses in a way that  we could find a clever solution for the parking, because, as I said, the problem we have in  Holland, we cannot afford the parking garage for terrace housing, but we had to realise  that the houses in the building were not completely on the ground floor, on the street side,  and you cannot park on the street anymore, because you drive in houses actually, not  so smart, and what we did was we turned the driving in house, kind of H&D grays around,  so we had to put the street on the backside, then we park on the backside of the house,  so it means we have a free facade towards the street, and we have, let's say, a kitchen  on the ground floor and living room on the first floor, we combined both with a void,  and we basically offered two different outside spaces, you have a bit more collective garden  at the front side, and you have a private terrace on the backside on top of the parking  garage, so it's quite simple in a way, you see it also in the floor plans, so it's very  straightforward, and in our way of working we are, let's say, also very much inspired  by this kind of modernistic attitude, but also that what we learned in East Germany  at the school, so it's very much based on a sort of rationalistic approach, so trying  to make good foundations very clear, trying to set up a very clear skeleton, and just  fill the skeleton with apartments, and we work a lot of, with prefabricated elements,  because when you work with repetition, then you can use prefab, and prefab is very often  in terms of quality, better than, and people do the work on site, and then you see how  people check them out, you see very rigid structure, so basically you can still see  the construction that we like a lot, as a sort of basis for the organization of the  houses, and one of the problems we are suffering a lot in housing is the fact that I already  mentioned that it's not really architecture, so you have to introduce very often some clumsy  tricks to keep the things together, and especially when you see from urban and metropolitan  parts of the view that what we did here as well is that we had an aluminium system for  the facades, it was the best way to do these facades, but we had to use for the head-facade  steel plates, because they were cheaper and more stable than aluminium, and on the backside  we had to use, or we could use wooden windows, because the windows were a bit smaller, and  then the question is how you bring all these kind of weird materials together, and you  can make a brilliant collage when we don't like so much collage, because you are looking  more for something that forms really a sort of more stable entity, and at the end we decided  to paint everything white, because it was the only way to keep these mix of materials  somehow together, but then with all the authority that was invented in the night before, and  the buildings by Schinkel, for instance, you see very often that the classicism already  at that time was a very shingling, and let's say talking a bit about suburban qualities  you can see here on the east side of the facade, what's the park, these kind of big terraces  that still bring in a little bit suburbia into the city, and you see the most surprising  space in the entire project, parking garage, and you see that even if the house is all  small, the inside measure is 4 meters or 50, that it's still light and open, and quite  nice place.  And what we do quite often in these housing projects is that we, in terms of building  physics, it's always not so easy, but you tune quite a lot to get building permissions  to build these apartments like that, but very often at the end, two years later, we make,  we send people a letter and just ask them about the houses just to find out if the  things work like expected, and we do that for two reasons.  One reason is you can learn a bit if the calculations and the expectations you had are right, but  on the other hand, it's also super smart in the discussion with the clients, because very  often the clients pretend that they know everything, and if you show something like  that, then they say, okay, fuck it.  And you can have really a sort of clear argumentation why people like certain things, and we all  always have this kind of fascination for the production of these neutral grey, broad  solutions, and we were very happy that this project was included in the new, because it  fits very much into our way of thinking too.  And at the moment we do a new low scale housing project quite compact, even more compact actually  by the way in Hanhainmen, and the real construction is installed next month.  The next thing I would like to show was a sort of study commission we had for the City  of Groningen, but I think it was an interesting question, that's why I would like to show  the project here, because the City of Groningen is a city in the north of Holland with about  100,000 inhabitants, and they decided okay, we need a bit more compact city, we don't  want to have really a lot of growth on the outside, but they noticed that people were  not so interested to live in apartment buildings, because they have a lot of apartments buildings  and they said if you want to attract people, or if you want to convince people to stay  in the city, we have to offer more individualized housing in high density.  And that was an interesting question, and also a bit typical for Holland, because I  only see these questions quite often, and they had quite a nice side close to the city  centre, and the question they had was actually quite insane, because they said, yeah, when  you look on the diagram on the left hand side, you see the normal density of the raised  housing in the States in Europe, it's about 35, 40, 30 houses per hectare, that's maximum.  And then they said, yeah, actually what we want is basically the double, so they said  we want to have low rise housing, but with double density, and then you come up with  the diagram, the second diagram, and then you see the distance between the houses is  so small that you cannot imagine any more people could live there, and then we tried  to find the organization how to manage, and what we actually proposed was a sort of double  building block, also not something that was completely new, because I think in Amsterdam  in the 1920s you have already housing projects using a similar system, and the interesting  thing was that we, let's say with this kind of housing problem, we could make terraced  houses, and the ring on the outside was orientated to the park, and the ring on the inside would  be oriented towards a courtyard, and it produced this section, so we made the houses on the  outer ring a bit bigger and on the smaller ring a bit smaller, with an interior straight,  six meters wide, and that was actually the model we produced, and you see a little bit  of how that could work, and so the distance between the block was about 25 meters, and  we see the zone that we used for the access of the apartment, six meters wide, and actually  we tried quite hard to do it, so we actually had two projects where we tried to make it  with one where we were already very close, but then we actually, then it was cancelled,  it was a bit, it's a bit of a pity, but it was quite, let's say as an issue, it was  quite interesting, and let's say this kind of typology was also in terms of, let's say  how you look on it, actually interesting because you don't know anymore, do we talk about terraced  housing or do we talk about apartments, and it was in terms of interpretation of the government  rules, interesting one, and because of that it was also interesting to talk, do we talk  about energy we don't know anymore, is this facade here, is it really outside or is it  already inside, so we also, let's say this kind of typology also offers, let's say some  possibilities for energy efficient solutions.  The next project I would like to show is the typology of the tower block, and you can  look at the project in this wall, so the north of Amsterdam, and for us, let's say looking  back on the development of architecture in the 20th century, we are always very much  fascinated by this image, because of the difference we notice, because when you look back on the  Popesier, then Popesier proposed the Maison Domino as a radical solution for housing,  so we have floors, we have columns, and we have staircase that formed somehow the basis,  and then he started with architecture, so you always use that system, it was more or  less given for him, and then he started to design, design facades and board spaces and  so on, and now in our case if it's different, let's say we see it not so much as the basis  to design, but we see it actually as architecture, so we think that maybe, especially when you  have no money, this is maybe already enough, and especially when you go to the south, to  Greece, or to southern Italy, or to Egypt, and so on, you see this system very often  as the basis principle for the production of housing, and we think there's a lot of  quality in it, because you have, you see there's a sort of freedom, you can imagine very different  kind of uses, and we think that's an interesting quality that an architect would have that  you don't offer a fixed solution, but you offer basically freedom, and this is also  to do with the next image, because I mean in the 1920s, architects tried to, let's say,  produce with their design, a lot of freedom for the inhabitants, and they proposed a certain  lightness of, I think this lightness somehow became reality, because the Bauhaus turned  directly into Ikea, and AI and GC, even in Europe, I mean the lifestyle is becoming more  and more light, and people become more and more flexible, and I think the difference  between housing and office, for instance, is not so clear anymore as it was 100 years  ago, and now coming back to the tower block, I mean if we have the chance, I think we like  the tower block very much, because of the fact that the tower block is a very efficient  typology, and whenever we have the chance to design or propose a tower block like a  Comgie, we do it because we know that in terms of, let's say, price, quality relation, we  can produce relatively okay designs with it, and let's say the strategy we use is again  the search of the 50s, I would say, and where, let's say, we try to make deep floor plans,  we try to organize the apartments all along on the edges, we put the access in the middle  of the block, so we have again a bit of a claustrophobic basis, and we try to break this claustrophobic  situation by opening the facade to the maximum, and we continue in a relatively straightforward  way in this housing project in small, and it's a mix of 50%, student housing, 50% social  housing, and we particularly like that project very much because you can read in this project  two tendencies, on one hand it's very much inspired by our love for rationalistic architectures,  when you close your eyes you can still see a little bit of Adwasi and Umos, a little bit  of meese, but on the other hand when you look on the, let's say, especially on these kind  of situations, then you see also that we are belonging a bit to the post-punk generation,  so we like also very much this kind of anarchy in these projects, that there is a sort of  freedom that you can do, that people have a sort of freedom to do something they want,  and that the facade is not, let's say, an element that regulates the relation between  outside and inside, but in that case more a sort of interface, let's say, where you  have a sort of screen and you can, you could say, adapt the screen to your personal wishes.  The project is actually very simple and organized, and the good thing was that we had even a  little space over in the middle of the clock, so we could introduce a void through the Google  app, and you can see here, actually, that's the void, and on the ground floor we made  a double entrance hall, very similar, and then you get to this section, that is in reality  quite amazing because you come, you see the building project, and from the outside you  don't expect that there is a sort of bigger space that is open in the inside, and there  are again a lot of repetition that we try to work relatively close together with the  industry to find out on one end how they think, and on the other hand get a low price for  the product to be used, and it's in the beginning of, in the beginning it was quite an investment  you do, but you sort of normally build up certain knowledge, and with the knowledge  you become more so read quicker, and you see a little bit of the content, and the interesting  thing, let's say, about this project was that it was built for relatively ordinary budget  for social housing, and it's a lot better than this stuff, you know, we get it, and  what you can like here in this project, you can open 50% of the facility, and it means  that the project in winter looks quite emetic, while in summer a lot of things, and the windows  are open with dialogue with the surrounding, and let's say when you enter you see here  these entrance walls, and then you come to the normal floor, so when you leave to live  you see this kind of situation, as you can see, I mean in social housing there is not  much money, so it was also for us very painful to design this project, because the concrete  you see is not in situ concrete, it's just ordinary concrete you get, and just very  lighting, very cheap steel handrails, and acoustic ceiling, and but still I think it's  very, very good, and it was at least interesting to offer a little space to the people who  share together, and when you come there, because especially it's student housing, there's a  lot of things going on in the corridors, and it's quite, it's quite, and what we like  very much is that, let's say looking back on the history of modern housing architecture,  that when the East was the old building in 1930 to 2010 housing was heavily attacked,  and because the other people were pretending it was possible to live there, and but nowadays  you see that the loft became very much common sense, so when you go to whatever bookshop  in the countryside, they had always at least three or five books about lofts somewhere  in Vietnam, and the only question is what we have nowadays, how can we afford this kind  of housing, and we're very happy that we could, let's say, make these kind of apartments,  they are 100 square meters, and you could pay, you think, 540 euro per month for these  houses, and it's, let's say, for Holland quite amazing that you can get that kind of  quality.  And the next project is the project in The Hague, again about strip housing, but this  time about, this is a gallery, and it's a talking about housing is also really strange,  because on one hand, we always say minimalism is not a choice, because you see that when  you look back on production of architecture, that money became less and less, it's less  to design, and we can hardly, let's say, in New Zealand, this project does not so much  design than because you see everything on standard products, and you just put them in  and that's it, and you see that as sort of global tendency, so you take ever very cheapest  product and the housing project is finished, but on the other hand, you also wonder where  the money disappeared, and we experience actually very clear in this housing project, it's,  on the side was a housing block by the famous Dutch architect, Udoch, and housing corporation  decided to knock the block down, and because they couldn't renovate it, because the opponents  were keeping our fence on, our flexible fence on, and the strange thing was that they asked  to rebuild the same amount of houses, but actually the size of the entire project was  the double size of the housing project of Udoch, but that leaves half of the people  then in the 50s, so that means within 60 years time, everything was growing by factor  four, but it's really insane, but this also, let's say, describes the other side of the  area, it became so rich that within 60 years, we could go from 12 and a half square meter  per person to 50, and in the 50s they had maybe for these 100 houses, they had maybe  10 cars in our day, and so it was quite tough to do that, and at the end we used a lot of  know-how from the project I showed in Austol to find a solution for the parking, and we  set the project up as two parallel strips, and in the slab we had on the ground floor  mezzanet housing, so we made a dupe access at the ground floor level, and on the upper  floors we could not avoid the gallery access apartments, but we don't like not very much,  because you know that you have obviously a little bit of privacy problem, especially  if the apartment is only on ground floor, but it was actually the only way to manage  within the costs, we don't also something about sustainability, because the strange  thing is that the project was so big that we could use geodynamic insulation, and by  that we understood that insulating the facades is not, let's say, so important to put these  machines in, because when you have these machines you can save so much energy that you can do  with the facades where you want them, so sometimes, and that's why we also think that  the issue of sustainability should be solved on the urban level and not with the architecture,  because it's far too complicated, and you see how the project works, again, repetition,  and the big entrance in the middle, and in that way, in this particular detail, for the  first time the facade is more or less independent from the structure, and the interesting thing  was because of the fact that the project is quite big, we could also put the guys from  the industry a bit under pressure, because everybody wanted to do it, and that had actually  two advantages, the first was that we could rebuild a big mock-up of one of the facade  elements, because the housing project was used for elderly people, and the client was  a bit nervous of the combination of sliding doors and elderly people, and then we had  the mock-up, and then we rented a bus from the elderly organization, went there with  20 of elderly people, and then they tested the facade, and because of the fact that these  elderly people are very often quite modernistic in mind, they were very enthusiastic, and  the client could say, okay, we do it, if the people can deal with it, and they like it,  we do, and the other thing was that because of the fact that we used a lot of aluminium,  we could redesign the aluminium profiles the way we wanted, and just to get a bit more  elegant and fascinating.  And another issue was because of the fact that the project was very big, we could use  the 70s technology, the famous tunnel construction, and by doing so we also could reuse the costs  because of the construction of the entire project could be built for only three months,  it normally takes six months because of that, and we tried to use the construction again  as a direct basis for the organization of the apartment and tried to make it within  the construction of the rooms.  The funny thing was that the organization was a little bit afraid of our anarchistic  facade and then they said, okay, and we have also a bit of money over, so we give you even  money for curtains, so the curtains belong, let's say, to the facade, so when you rent  an apartment, you have to rent it with these curtains, but you have a second way where  you can put your personal clothes, and here you see the outlooks in detail, and the facade  is transparent, there are curtains, you see the terraces on the first floor without plans,  and then the galleries on the upper floors, and this is something very Dutch, we tried  to make the gallery a bit wider and to give people the opportunity to occupy a part of  the gallery, and Dutch people do that because it just becomes very much a Dutch culture,  and it's okay for them, I think.  And you see a bit the interior, so you have a loft-like situation, and on the ground floor  you have a mezzanette housing, and you see a bit of the curtains work, and we built at  the moment in Antwerp, a civil law project, but then for, let's say, for the free model,  it's a quite expensive apartment, and it's actually the first time that we can use a  sort of prefabricated concrete facade, so we have panels from up to 4x4 meters, so we  are very close to what our friends in Switzerland do, like, you know, in Dino, and we could,  and if even in Belgium it's complicated, but we could do that because we are at the moment  economic crisis in Holland, and we could find a Dutch company that was willing to do it,  and really transport all the stuff from Holland to Belgium, and we are in Berlin, next month,  and the interesting thing is that I talked at the beginning a little bit about suburbia,  you may hear apartments that are 120 square meter surfaced, and they have a 60 square  meter outside space in form of winter gardens, so that means that there are a lot of elderly  people that bought their house, and they basically bring their garden into the city centre, and  you can see a photograph of the terrace, so they are all between 10 and 12 meters, and  then 2 and a half meters deep, and you can open them up, and you have them on both sides,  so it's quite nice, so we are actually extremely happy that that happened, because my partner  was working on the approaching, and I always made jokes about it, and said, you will never  make that, it will be impossible, and the moment was so quick, and that really happened,  so it was quite, we were really lucky, and we just recently won another competition in  Germany, where we do, we all, again, work with the gallery, but this time in combination  with Duplex, where we try to really make family houses in high density, and we hope that we  can build it soon.  The next project I would like to show is a bit strange one, because it's not really  housing, it's something, yeah, between housing and hotel, it's a sort of project for heroin  addicted in Amsterdam, and we are very much inspired also by the issue of healthcare,  just because of the fact that the European population is getting older and older, it  will change a lot, let's say, the architecture, and I think there are really new solutions  for housing possible, because you can suffer from it, you can say, fuck, we have to do  only wheelchair and so on, but I think also the level of typology, this will be used in  types of housing, because we need much more flexibility and higher ability of a partner  project, and we already from the beginning of the office proposed it, because we had  a very poor idea to say, okay, we offer a sort of very simple loft-like basis, and then  we say, okay, we can use this for filling in apartments in different size or office  spaces, but nobody was really interested, and it had just simply to do with the fact  that the market for housing and the market for offices is completely separate, it's  a people with new housing, most people with new offices, and by the issue, but what is  interesting that in the whole healthcare world, this is becoming closer to never, and  the issue of flexibility, people also understand that they have to build more flexible structures,  and the project we built in Amsterdam was actually organized very simple, it's a sort  of a Scottish plan based on a grid structure with commas, so we can basically, if they  want it, so they can take out the complete interior and make a new arrangement, and then  we have only one floor, and that's it, and so we have a very simple structure, it's  based on commas, and because of the fact that we had to do a lot of smaller spaces, and  all the spaces wanted to find a place on the facade, we had on the inside always a little  bit of a sort of mod, because we had to fill this Spanish box, it was given in the end  of the plan, so we proposed to make a big living room in the middle of the project,  and there were some specific conditions regarding the estate, because the heroin addicts in  the house were not allowed to open the window, so we had to design basically a building like  a refrigerator, and we also were wondering what that would mean for the facade, and we  quickly found out that we could not afford structural buildings, so we used a sort of  alternative system to fix the glass panels, that was quite typical for our way of working,  because we talked to a company that was specialized in that, and then we said, okay, we can fold  this kind of aluminium plates to fix the glass, but we said, actually we don't want the  deceased building, but we want to have them extruded, and the guy said, yeah, you know,  we'll only take 1,500 kilos of aluminium, and if you want to extrude them, I mean it's only  visible if it only worked with 3 different profiles, and then we had a guy in the office  who was, I would say, free for that, and I said, 2 guys, I said, hey, come on, we should  try to do it with 3 profiles, can you do it, and then they made the design of the profiles,  and basically we made the detail where we have one vertical, but they don't see, but  we have those 2 profiles, and you see it up on the top, we turned them around, so we have  only these 3 elements, and by that we could, let's say, make this facade, especially produced  profiles, very slimmer, only like 5 centimetres, and we had a discussion with the housing  corporations about this band, because they wanted to make a facade with bands, and the  grid was not visible, they didn't want to have outside insulation, and then the question  was what to do, and then we said, okay, maybe we can use a system with glass tiles, and  the glass tiles were far too expensive, especially when you use the Italian ones, and then we  went on the Alibaba tour, so we found a company in Amsterdam that, let's say, imported glass  tiles from China, and with FedEx you could negotiate it with these guys, we could always  more cups and more, and then at the end we brought the tiles in China for, I think,  20% of the price of the Italian ones, and then it's really, let's say, that you only do  because of the pressure, because the economic pressure is so strong that it was the only  way to get it done at the end, you see the third facade, the courtyard on the top, and  then you need to do the space in the middle, and how it is used, and again the facade,  I say this is separated from the structure, we're using this kind of strange space, and  we have quite a lot, and we especially like the honest mile way of living of the inhabitants,  because they really have nothing you just take what you find on the street and live there,  and it's quite inspiring somehow, and actually it's a work with similar typologies, also  in our projects we are working on a house there, a village in Heist of Kubea in Belgium,  where we do elderly housing, where we use atrium for different collective uses, and  we also worked a couple of years ago on the project for student housing, where we try  to step different kind of, these kind of spaces to let's say separate or indicate different  communities within the world.  At a certain moment the Dutch economy was very, started to become very bad, I think  in 2009 or something, and then we said, okay, the housing market completely collapsed,  because there were too much houses, and we said, okay, we have to export our knowledge  of housing, if you want to survive that was very simple, this is going to be a question,  but you also find out that you have to adapt to different local building cultures, because  in Europe there is not one building or living culture, because when you look on every country  there are always things that are different, and this is one of our first housing projects  abroad, in terms of parents, and it's also against the housing, when we here proposed  to work with Wintergarten as a basis for the organization of the house, because we like  Wintergarten quite a lot, because they, especially in urban situations, they can function as  a sort of plant proper, but they also very often have a sort of noise protection function,  and they can give also a little bit more privacy on housing spaces, and especially in this project  it was quite important, because we are very close to the Boulevard Territory in Norma,  and we had to do two very small urban buildings, because it was not possible to change the  design of the building, and it was very often told, and a lot of countries told me,  the urbanists basically define what they have to design, and then at the end you come and  you find out there's not so much to design anymore, because everything is defined by the  urbanists, and actually it should be the other way around, the architects should define the  design, and we proposed two blocks with public functions on the ground floor, and Wintergarten  on the top, and you see the typical French floor plan, we could not really avoid, we see  here extremely small, nasty staircase, we can see all housing property in Paris, and  again you have this typical housing type of cheese for France, called T1, T2, T3, and T4,  we got basically 80% of the city of built with the same type of housing, it's actually a very  horrible idea, and the only difference let's say we offered was the fact that we said okay,  we have to accept it, we cannot escape from it, and the only thing we had to say was okay,  what we had to do is we make a balcony all around, we make the balcony deeper, and we  make it double-hasseed, and by that you have a sort of winter apartment, we tried to make  the apartments as open as possible to let's say transform this different situation in  something that we could accept, because there was not a moment to reinvent something new,  and what was interesting was that we were very much focusing on the building method,  French clients were completely irritated with what we were doing, so we were really very  much trying to pre-define already how the builders had to build to get the project into  costs, we tuned quite a lot, but at the end we could let's say manage, and we made actually  apartments that are far more open than they usually are, and there are I think also including  the battle than what you normally find on the housing model, so we have this kind of  balcony all around, we have a double layer for noise protection, climate protection,  and the projects in moment under construction, we actually also really shopped about the  quality in France, because in France you can really see what 30 years of neoliberalism  means to Europe, it means that at the end you really want where people on the building  side know what you do, because the knowledge is so cool that there has been a difference  between North Africa and let's say France is not existing anymore, in terms of quality  we have also brought in Morocco, it's really the same, we were really shocked let's say,  how that, let's say, about the reality on the building side, but okay we managed, and  this is a photograph from two weeks ago, so the blocks are on the way of completion,  and you see that the facade with the outside layer of the winter gardens, and we are really  looking forward to the results. The last project I would like to show is, it's not really a  typology, but it is a sort of a thing, when you talk about metropolitan housing, a thing  was very important, because it's the issue of refurbishment of the common ensemble, because  what we see is that, I think since the 17th we see already the percentage of transformation  projects is growing like hell, while the new projects are really going down, especially  in Holland, I think the peak was in the 1970s, they built in Holland 250,000 apartments per  year, and at the moment they talk about coming boom, so it's going a little bit better, and  they talk now about building 40,000 apartments, so you see that the production since the last  40 years really went down by 8%, 70%, while transformation is becoming more and more  issue, for a few reasons, but also for sustainability, and there's also the new gas, the new empty  estates, in terms of techniques, and problems to tackle, but refurbishment means nowadays  also something else than in the past, because it was relatively easy to renovate the building  and even adapt to new conditions, but nowadays we see there are a lot of norms and regulations  that become stronger and stronger, and they are not only for new buildings, but also for  existing ones, and what we see is the gap between what the government wants and what you can  do is becoming bigger and bigger, and there's pressure for these kind of projects, and in  the office we do from time to time this kind of refurbishment, we more or less by accident  got the 2002 commission for the refurbishment of 800 apartments in Holland, and it was for  us a very disappointing project on one hand, because we couldn't do it so little, but on  the other hand we learned really a lot by doing it, so it was a sort of quite tough school  to work on that project, and what I would like to show quickly is a project we do at the  moment in Antwerp, where we could lose a lot of knowledge from the past, and we can go  much further than we could go in the project we just showed, and this is a project for  the refurbishment of two slag buildings, and they are from the 1970s, and they completely  run down, and actually the housing corporation wanted to knock them down, but then they found  out that when they were knocked down, they could only build up to four floors, and they  said, no, no, no, we should keep them, because otherwise we cannot build enough houses, and  the houses have quite some problems in terms of how the access is organized, because it's  really strange, because this is the front side of your apartments, but the access is  basically on the backside, hardly to be seen from the outside, and it's very social, quite  tricky, and the galleries have closed other streets, but your apartments have actually  quite a nice view on the landscape, and what we actually do is very simple, just shoot  some diagrams, so we have in the buildings a floor plan, somehow like that, and what we  do is we demolish the entire interior, we take everything out, but we also demolish the  staircase, and the stairs, to organize that a little bit in a more logical way, so what  we actually keep, the only thing we keep is the skeleton, and then we put new floors  on the facade of the building, by doing so we can orientate the entrance halls towards  the street, and we put balconies on the east side all around the block, and by doing so  we can give the apartment also a big outside space, what it doesn't have in the moment,  and what we like quite a lot is the next step, by doing that we can even take out, we can  even change the construction, so we take out the concrete walls that are necessary for  the stability, because we put them now on the outside, so we take out these walls, and  we put those ones, but we do it in two steps, so we bit force the core and then take it  out, because our walls are structured, collapse, and then we get the relatively flexible basis  in between, and we fill in different types of housing according to these stupid regulations  that they have to use, that again offer not so much freedom, and now that's actually the  situation at the moment, so they're just on the way to removing everything, and we are  super enthusiastic, because you see that demolition can be also quite funny, and what we do is  that we wrap the facades with glass balconies and a lot of glass plates, you see the new  entrance walls towards the street, and the apartments on the ground floor, the exit from  the street, and then you see the balconies on the upper floors, we see the detailing of  the entrance situation, and the adaption of the galleries, and the interior, new interior  of the apartments with glass balconies, and this is another project where we actually  have a completely different situation here, we basically try to keep everything that's  made for this, thank you very much.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.
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