Social housing client with ambitions for sustainability

The client GWG Tübingen is a social housing organization that provides socially and environmentally responsible housing for large groups in society. On a plot in the district Derendingen, the client issued a competition for a mixed housing development of 12000m2 – or around 145 units.

The purpose of the competition is to propose an affordable and sustainable development of high quality for which the connection to the existing and in part listed buildings and landscapes is resolved with a unique plan.

”At Vandkunsten we are incredibly pleased of the opportunity to deliver a project in Tübingen. The city has been a source of so much inspiration and the client GWG Tübingen shares so many of our values for providing housing and neighborhoods that are socially and environmentally sound.” Says Jan S. Kaushen, an architect and partner at Vandkunsten Architects.

Modern village
the project draws inspiration from the historical village character of the district of Derendingen which is located near central Tübingen and on the outskirts of the Rammert nature reserve.

The location of the plot is Sieben-Höfe Strasse, which literally refers to the 7 farms that the road once connected. With the ambition of a close connection between the new development and the existing village character, the architects studied traditional farm typologies for 2, 3 and 4 winged ‘höfe’.

Nordic vernacular housing clusters ’tun’ have inspired Vandkunsten for decades now the office vocabulary has been expanded with hof-clusters as social and urban ways of designing housing developments. The competition proposes a new dorf-strasse, a car-free village street connecting the 7 new hof-clusters of the development. Each hof-cluster has a shared courtyard space and additional social spaces connect to the dorf-strasse. Buildings face the street either with a gable or the long side. From the village street is also the entrance to the underground parking facility.

The dorf-strasse connects to another path to the East, and to the West is the village church and the cemetery.

Vandkunsten has designed the project Fællesbyg Køge Kyst near completion, with direct inspiration from Tübingen as the town is well-known for its 20+ year tradition of joint building ventures called Baugruppen.