Residential Area Gerken’s Farm, Schloss Holte-Stukenbrock. Architectural Competition 2011, Honorable Mention

Living in nature is the underlying theme of the design. For this purpose 17 single housing blocks with different numbers of units were proposed and evenly spread over the site. To allow uninterrupted vistas from the apartments as much as possible as onto the woods in the south west of the site the single blocks were allocated in an offset pattern. The housing blocks are of different size. From west to east the sizes of the housing blocks diminish thereby constituting the transition from the large-scale industrial buildings to the detached single-family houses of the adjacent residential area.

Inside the housing blocks the apartment units are grouped around a central atrium that is commonly used by the residents as a communicative center. To support communication, the apartments were designed in such a way that each of them has windows facing the atrium. The majority of the apartments is generated by individual modules on two floors, 6 by 6 meters in size. The modular composition of the units aims at providing a high amount of flexibility for the design of the blocks.

The architectural design aims at making the modular construction method perceivable but at the same time tying the individual units together with a folded roofscape. By choosing one material for roofs and walls the blocks appear as homogenous entities, despite of its heterogeneity in form, and the quarter as a whole becomes a coherent structure.