Apartments

The project for asylum seekers comprises two building structures in modular wood construction. The two buildings together with the community center, the nearby cemetery building, and the adjoining pavilion form a coherent ensemble. The two-building structures are set in such a way that a courtyard area is formed as a neighborly counterpart. The courtyard faces away from the cemetery and is protected from view. The residential development is intended to function for different user groups with different “living time-spaces”. Eleven apartments – ranging from shared apartments to families – are accessed via an exterior arcade.

The project consists of the transformation of an ancient metal workshop in the ground floor and basement of a housing building in Paris into living units. The main goal was to find the right typologies to transform the lower parts of the building into pleasant housing and to densify a building by the bottom and not, like it is often the case, by the upper part.

On what was once proposed as a site for a drive-thru McDonald’s in Thamesmead, an outer suburb of West London, The Reach provides well-designed, affordable new homes for over 170 residents. Its distinctive curved façade of banded red brickwork reinvigorates an existing local centre with a new sense of place, encouraging further regeneration and investment in the area. Brightly coloured projecting balconies animate the façades enclosing a generous south-facing communal garden. The Reach not only demonstrates how to densify London’s outer suburbs and help tackle the city’s housing crisis; it also delivers beautiful but affordable homes for local residents.

The project is a development of vertical housing, deployed with three buildings in a total extension of 10,126m2. A fundamental part of the project has to do with the terrain, because it conserves a canyon with a significant density of trees and plants, so that 80% of the land is destined for green areas and open space, this represents a privilege, given its urban condition.