Supervisor:
Beate Hølmebakk
Chris-Johan Engh
The village becomes the arena for a speculative architecture of both fact and fiction that critically addresses current spatial and social issues, such as demographic growth and urbanization, while navigating through the intimacy of a village.
Through 3 designs, serving as case studies for vertical expansion atop existing masonry structures, a reinterpretation of an attic structure is made as a new timber structure that can house more people, and where current and new inhabitants share ground.
Aligned with a Belgian policy to cease construction on undeveloped land by 2040, the project adheres to and expands upon this ambition by working exclusively within the existing built fabric of the village.
The project becomes an architecture of both about construction and about its inhabitants.
Most buildings in the village are constructed in masonry with timber gabled roofs. In collaboration with a Belgian structural engineer, I examined the load-bearing capacity of existing masonry walls to determine their potential for vertical extension. The outcome is a strategy involving lightweight timber additions, which are structurally supported by the existing buildings. Where attics and gabled roofs are often used to be a climatic unhabited buffer space, they now transform into a new timber structure that can house more people, with minimal ground impact.
The project is as much about its inhabitants, both the current and the new. In villages relationships are concrete. People know each other’s names, stories, and histories. Densification here isn’t abstract, its local and personal. As part of my studytrip, I met up with the existing inhabitants, to integrate their stories in the coexistence with the new. It resulted in an architecture that designs coexistence, rather than imposition, through seperate entrances, individual addresses, thoughtfull transitions and an architecture that is shared, yet autonomous. It is at all times facilitating local encounters without forcing interaction.
It challenges the conventional ideal of single-family homes with private gardens, and instead proposes a collaborative, flexible, and sustainable alternative.
The project culminates in 3 case-studies, each acting on a different scale, in a different village segment and with a different complexitiy.
Pastoriestraat 5
This is the house of Diane & Norbert, they will live together with 2 new households. This intervention introduces three additional storeys atop the existing structure. The original building is set back from the street; the new timber volume continues this gesture, with each floor slightly recessed, and cantilevering towards the back. This approach results in a vertical sequence of terraces and independent entrances, enabling each household to retain a unique address and a direct relationship to public life in the village center.
Kapellestraat 24
This is the house of Martin & Marie-Rose, they will live together with 4 new households. On this site, a detached villa is vertically extended by two storeys, transforming the single-family villa into a group villa. The timber addition rests on the existing masonry walls and cantilevers around its original footprint. The original residents remain on the ground floor. Above them, four additional households are accommodated each inhabiting a vertical section in the house, while each unit maintains independent access and its own internal staircase. The staircases intertwine in pairs, offering a sublte intimate presence of the other. The result is a form of shared living with strong personal autonomy.
Kerkhofstraat 23
This is the house of Wim & Jenny, they will live alongside an elderly home and two studios for asylum seekers. This is the most complex intervention, situated on the largest site of the village. It accommodates an empathic care center, integrating housing for the elderly and communal services vital to village life. A CLT tower is introduced, where the elevator shaft becomes the primary structural element, wrapped by an outdoor staircase leading up to the highest room in the village, made accessible for the public, wheelchair users, elderly and the villagers. Each residential unit in the tower has its own outdoor entrance, that connects to the outdoor staircase, supporting informal social interaction between visitors and residents.
A fourth infrastructural gesture extends the narrative beyond the buildings themselves with a landscape intervention as a response to the increased car mobility and the mounted pressure on outdoor spaces.
Along the way, the project revealed something more: the tools and strategies developed suggest that the village could support not just 180 more inhabitants, but potentially 180 + 180 + 180 + 180, still within the same limits of the existing masonry walls. What began as a study in restraint evolved into a vision of compact abundance.
This is an architecture of both stories and structures. Of mutual respect and coexistence. Of optimism.
A speculative future, grounded in realism.
A reconsideration of the space we take on earth.
A shared ground.
Contact
Marie Keukeleire / marie.keukeleire@hotmail.be / +47 413 33 422