how to care about a house
T.J. Schade (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
T.G. Vrachliotis – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
R.R. van den Ban – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
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Abstract
European urban areas have a housing problem, but not a house problem. Property often exists, but not available to the market. Europe is arguably already built.
Housing, having turned an investment product, is increasingly under pressure, and a capital markets-based logic will only in-crease this. Participating in a socially and material exhaustive new-building practice will only strengthen this trend.
Counter-based strategies to uncontrolled growth should be sys-temic as imposed to avant-garde one-offs, and can inter alia be directed through the state with its powerful tool of legislating and financial incentivization.
Berlin’s lawmakers are developing a “Treuhänder” paragraph to reinstate housing which has been illegally left off the market. This tool sits at the intersection between architecture, econom-ics and care via the state apparatus. Research on this lever seeks to understand the opportunities and threats of vacant in-frastructure.
“Gründerzeit”-architecture makes up about 15% of the housing assets in berlin and they are a often privately. Shining light on the decades old construction techniques, as well as the legal, fi-nancial and co-living possibilities, this thesis seeks an answer to the dangers of capital gains in this 120+ year old archetype for housing by offering a catalogue of repair for the highly standard-ised brick-timber hybrids.