Counter-Housing : Commoning Domestic Space in Berlin
Counter-Housing is an alternative scheme for Berlin, a city caught in a contentious struggle for affordable housing. The project stands as a counter-argument to contemporary responses to the housing crisis and revisits radical principles analyzed in the theoretical statement Room for Women: An Atlas of Feminist Housing Projects from the 1980s. Located at the intersection of former and new transport infrastructures in Alt-Treptow, the project pushes the limits of traditional cooperative practices by proposing a public-commoning model – a cooperative of tenants on a site granted by the Municipality. Through this hybrid structure, shielded from private ownership and speculative processes, the proposal seeks to secure lower rents, and greater accessibility and diversity. Architecturally, this translates to one basic structure: a grid of generous and equal-sized rooms that can be appropriated for various uses and do away with domestic hierarchies. Five mutualized wet cores choreograph possible use of space, varying in their configuration on each floor to suggest a gradient of “sharedness”. Departing from traditional corridors, the cores provide circulation that weaves between, rather than avoids, housework. The roof stands as the exception to the building’s systematic layout, where the wet cores emerge as playful extrusions and venues for collective leisure. The proposal understands the whole building as one house and blurs the boundaries between rooms, households, and dwelling units.
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