MADE Housing Project 2018

Original brief: As with many cities around the world, Copenhagen and Aalborg present challenges to finding affordable student housing, while maintaining good living standards with opportunities to both socialise and study. MADE students are asked to create a student residence through a holistic design process, which could be upscaled from a single building block and flexibly assembled and adapted to different sites and settings. The task requires a number of scale steps, from Small to Medium to Large to X-large. Sustainability, integrated design and Utzon’s philosophy regarding ‘additive architecture’ must be considered and the design should be suitable for two sites: a waterfront site in Aalborg Boatyard, and a city centre site in Copenhagen, amid classic karre buildings. Student approach: Key to our approach was seeking an inherent flexibility in the design which would allow students to personalise their own spaces and build community with other residents. We also sought to maximise the sustainability performance of our scheme through material selection and detailing, and by pursuing an inherently reusable design. Final proposal: We developed a modular timber scheme comprised of ‘tick’-shaped units that could each be used as individual bedroom modules and oriented in two directions, depending on the site requirements. Multiple units could be combined in myriad assemblies to form larger communal spaces such as kitchen and dining modules, toilet blocks and laundry rooms. Modules included supporting pieces such as lift shafts, footings, and inter-module walkways, which together formed a ‘kit-of-parts’ that could be applied to any site of any scale. We thought it an interesting, adaptable and reusable student housing solution, that empowered students to cultivate their own living spaces and helped catalyse communal connections.