Issue No. 1
Towards Today’s Habitat: New ways to live and work
Living and working have changed. New habits, new habitat?
Unfold, Issue No. 1
Towards Today’s Habitat
Towards Today’s Habitat: New ways to live and work
Unfold, Issue No. 1
Towards Today’s Habitat
Three Generation
House by BETA
Location: Amsterdam, NL
Status: complete
Project Signature: double-helix yellow staircase
Client: private family
Capacity: 7 inhabitants
Size: 450m2
Web: beta-office.com
Images by Ossip van Duivenbode
— Auguste van Oppen
Founder, BETA
G-LAB
by TC Plus
Location: Brugge, BE
Status: complete
Project Signature: curtain walls
Capacity: 5-14 inhabitants
Size: 160m2 home, 950m2 plot
Web: tc-plus.be
Images by Luc Roymans
This is a classic suburban single family home – but one that proposes a radical new model of living. Its architects, TC Plus, call it G-LAB (G for Generosity). Since renovating the house in 2018, the resident family has lived there with upwards of 1,500 people – a reality that challenges our traditional understanding of private property.
By design, this house blurs all conventional boundaries between publicly shared space and privacy of the home: the “front door” is an eight-meter wide curtain that literally anyone can enter. “G-LAB is outside a traditional economic model. You cannot rent or claim spaces, only share them.”
Using a series of curtains, the house is designed in layers to achieve different degrees of privacy within the home. However, when the curtains are open, it becomes a new kind of public plaza for the neighbourhood. Such an accessible, open habitat raises questions around privacy and security.
But when you think about it, our locks, fences, and surveillance systems are in fact mostly psychological forms of security. These measures will never effectively stop someone who is truly determined. What better form of security than a tight-knit community where everyone knows each other? As a first response, doesn’t this feel safer than counting down for the police to respond?
If we can reframe our psychological boundaries, new relationships to habitat and each other are possible. Beyond our traditional understanding of property, the goal is to rethink the suburban lifestyle so that strangers and neighbours can meet, share, and overcome artificial boundaries. As Tom Callebaut, founder of TC Plus puts it: “The G-LAB is not only a place, but a welcoming gesture to society.”
— Tom Callebaut
Founder, TC Plus
Urban Village Project
by SPACE10 & EFFEKT
Status: prospective research
Project Signature: timber grid frame
Client: SPACE10
Web: space10.com
Images by EFFEKT
— Bas van de Poel
Creative Director, SPACE10
Cohabitation Unit
by Cutwork
Status: research
Client: private
Project Signature: shared balconies
Capacity: 48 units
Size: 3,500 m2
Images by Cutwork
— Antonin Yuji Maeno
Cofounder & Lead Architect, Cutwork
Regen Villages
by EFFEKT
If things continue as they are today, by 2050, we will need 3 earths to sustain our booming worldwide population. It’s clear we need bold new visions to rethink our relationships between habitat, resources, and consumption.
Regen Villages challenge the urban system to propose an independent, off-grid, circular habitat. Residents share various responsibilities in the village and are integral to maintaining its processes, particularly around food cultivation. “[Inhabitants] become part of a shared local ecosystem, so different families can take on different roles in the community. As well as fostering a sense of camaraderie, this also helps to lift burdens on struggling municipal governments.”
Each village of 25 homes combines sustainable energy technologies and infrastructure to establish energy positive homes, distributed energy storage, home greenhouses to grow your own food, vertical farming, aquaponics and aeroponics, water management and waste-to-resource systems. This self-regenerative ecosystem allows the village to work as autonomous off-the-grid community.
— Sinus Lynge
Founder, EFFEKT
Mokrin House by
architecture students
Location: Mokrin, SB
Status: complete
Project Signature: elevated tree terrace
Capacity: 24 inhabitants
Size: 2,000m2
Web: mokrinhouse.com
Images by Relja Ivanić
When we typically think about coworking and coliving, we typically picture such spaces within a dense urban environment. Mokrin House brings this concept deep into the rural landscape. Situated in the Northern corner of Serbia near the intersection of Romania and Hungry, Mokrin is nearly a two-hour drive from the nearest internation airport.
Remoteness is one of its defining features, appealing particularly to internationals and digital nomads escaping city life or those who desire a quiet, focused retreat. Reservations are all-inclusive: three meals a day of food grown locally on-site, high-speed wifi, and a range of work, play, social, and relaxation spaces to meet other guests and assemble transient communities.
The project was originally conceived to help revitalize the local village of Mokrin, which had deteriorated as cities steadily drew more and more people away. Today, Mokrin House has brought new forms of economy and livelihood back into the village and become a focal point of the local community. Much of village’s economy traces back through this new kind of home.
Locals often stop in to join the guests for dinner or meet with one another for tea on the grounds. It’s an unexpected microcosm for rural culture and international perspectives to collide and exchange – something our urban habitats could learn a lot from. Perhaps Mokrin House is the model for a new kind of 'global village' – a blueprint to help decentralize urban populations and ease the growing pressures on our cities.
— Branimir Brkljač
Founder, Mokrin House
Minimod
by MAPA
Location: multi-locations
Status: complete
Project Signature: panoramic windows
Capacity: 2-3 inhabitants
Size: 27m2
Web: mapaarq.com
Images by Leonardo Finotti
— Luciano Andrades
Cofounder & Director, MAPA
Edition
Unfold is a pocket-size, one-page magazine full of ideas for today’s living.
Every other week, one A4, one topic – from the perspectives of designers, inventors, sociologists, and architects.
By architecture and design studio CUTWORK.
Writers
Bryce Willem, Antonin Yuji Maeno, Léa Brosseau, Tracey Ingram
Images
Cutwork, Ossip van Duivenbode for BETA, Luc Roymans for TC Plus, EFFEKT, Relja Ivanić for Mokrin House, Leonardo Finotti for MAPA
Published
July 28, 2020
Sources
1
Davidson, Susan and Rossall, Phil. “Age UK Loneliness Evidence Review.” Age UK, July, 2015. Link.
2
Farha, Leilani. Push: Driven out of Cities. Directed by Gertten, Fredrik. WG Film and Cafe 7, 2019. Link.
3
Laferrère, Anne and Pouliquen, Erwan, et all. “Housing Conditions in France, 2017 Edition.” Institut National de la astatistique et des Études Économiques (INSEE), 2017. Link.
4
Repponen, Anton and Pereyra, Irene. “One Shared House 2030.” SPACE10, 2017. Link.
5
Klepeis, Neil, et all. “The National Human Activity Pattern Survey (NHAPS): A Resource for Assessing Exposure to Environmental Pollutants.” Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 2001. Link.
6
Powers, Julie and Ridge, Sheila. Nature-Based Learning for Young Children: Anytime, Anywhere, on Any Budget. Redleaf Press, December 11, 2018. Link.