Complex relations between town and architecture are in the process of being re-established, with a special intimacy in that their aim is urban densification, an aim which, for much of the new generation emerging from Europan, represents a major challenge. It is a way of experiencing the contemporary town more intensely, whilst at the same time designing individualised spaces and allowing town dwellers, in their diversity, to develop their specific identities and lifestyles.

- S333 Architecture + Urbanism
- Froetscher Lichtenwagner architekten
- Tania Concko architectes & urbanistes
- Pierre Gautier
- Atelier d’Architecture et d’Urbanisme - Boudry & Boudry
- OP architetti associati

REINVENTING THE DENSITY

(extracts from Didier Rebois article)

From sprawl to sustainability

A measurable environmental policy

The environmental approach transformed attitudes to the city and, although initially confined to experts and radicals, it gradually came to encompass wider public opinion and a proportion of the urban population. Indeed, this process was more rapid in the Northern European countries, where the cultural awareness of such issues is greater. As it grew more widespread, the movement sought to influence policies in order to change the ways that cities develop.
If general rules for an environmentally friendly urban planning system are needed at the European level, they are not enough to guarantee the quality of denser spaces at local level, even though, in the streets, car numbers have fallen and air quality has improved. It is to compensate for this deficiency that the winning teams mentioned in this chapter have chosen to give formal expression to new ideas and spatial references for a potential architecture of density. For them, the competition has provided an opportunity to test certain approaches and types of solutions, which they have successfully extended to other projects in their subsequent practice, in most cases with the support of their client.

Innovation driven by densification

Density as a basis for creativity

The S333 agency states its position from the start: increasing urban density within the context of sustainability policy is not only a necessity dictated by environmental factors, but also the stimulus for a new level of spatial creativity at a level lying between the urban and the architectural. The role of young professionals is to invent these new relations between spatial entities that have been united by densification. New urban morphologies need to be devised from the “promiscuity” of buildings and their interstices. To compress “houses” that were previously scattered around suburban housing estates means devising graduated relations between intimacy and communality. Permitting contact between public space and housing has to be reconciled with the creation of private outdoor spaces attached to dwellings. The feeling of living in a detached house needs to be preserved, even in town.

Diversity versus flexibility

Rather than perceiving density as a potential source of spatial homogeneity, the new generation experiences density as an opportunity to create complex spaces that reflect the disparate needs of town dwellers and diversities of lifestyle.
The famous Dutch firm MVRDV won Europan 2 around the concept of an urban monolith, a monumental shape that reacts to its sprawling surroundings by establishing a powerful signal within the landscape. However, the apparently simple envelope conceals a diverse arrangement of overlapping one-, two- and three-level residential units. Rejecting the idea of creating neutral spaces with an open development structure, MVRDV instead proposes architecturally highly distinct spaces that nevertheless break down into a multiplicity of arrangements, offering residents choices to match their lifestyles. After the competition project near the Wall in Berlin, which was never built because the Wall came down, MVRDV adapted the concept to multiple forms to match the contexts of other sites. As if to prove that Europan prize-winning projects are not driven by fashion, but rather anticipate changes in demand, ten years later, in a suburban district in Madrid, they were called upon to build a tower block very similar to the one in their Berlin proposal.
Nevertheless, trying to meet the needs of multiple users does not mean giving up spatial flexibility, or depriving residents of their own room for manoeuvre and means of taking ownership. That, in any case, is the position stated by Pierre Gautier and shared by other young professionals. Working between Paris and Rotterdam, and therefore with different types of client, in every project designed in the same spirit as the winning Zaanstad project for Europan 2 he tries to find the right match between a strong spatial identity and openness and adaptability to changes in lifestyle over time.

Finding intensity through a programmatic mix

A compact built fabric has to be accompanied by compact programming, to take up a phrase coined by the Boudry agency, a Europan 3 winner on a site in The Hague. It is not just about juxtaposing or superimposing a variety of functions, but also encouraging them to interact through appropriate spatial arrangements. Including shops within a residential complex in Zaanstad gives S333 the opportunity to create a lively street between two residential blocks. And as in the construction of the project by Fröschter and Lictenwagner, winners of Europan 4 in Innsbruck, this alliance of habitat and shopping can be combined with cultural functions that encourage encounters not just within buildings but also in public space.
For the new generation, density would be unthinkable without a certain dose of urban intensity. So it is common to see Europan winners thinking about programmatic aspects upstream of their projects, and connecting them very closely with their ideas about morphology. This is the case for Tania Concko, winner of Europan 2 at Zaanstad, who is working on restructuring a campus in Bordeaux originally designed on the insular and monofunctional lines typical of 1970s zoning practice. Taking as her starting point the de facto autonomy between urban space and architectural objects, she proposes a process of densification around three stress lines, conceived as linear platforms linked by parkland and infrastructure. On each platform, educational spaces and service spaces overlap – in a relationship that she describes as fusional – with public space that is composed in the cross-section of two interconnecting plates, creating a very lively vertical street.

This handful of themes and references is enough to demonstrate that the need for greater density in European towns can go hand-in-hand with a genuine spatial and social dynamic. Without seeking to caricature a so-called European model, and without giving up on urban vitality in the name of some sterile ideal of urban sustainability, the thirty or so projects presented in this chapter show that new relations between town and architecture can be established around the theme of density and the positive contradictions it generates.