site:
Bern Ausserholligen 'Gangloff'

Design Team:
Hans Venhuizen
Tom Frantzen
Rutger Pasman

Housing Block Concept:
Each appartment has a T-shape or a Z-shape in section and together form a homgenous mass. To emphasize the different possible dwelling types, each type is clad with its own type of wood, which results in puzzle-like graphics on the elevation of the building as a whole.

Since there are no longer limitations in technique, material and local traditions that, only decades ago, used to determine the shape of a project, we can practically build anything everywhere. Local traditions have been replaced by global habits and every building can be built in every landscape like it has fallen from the air. But the battle with the visible limitations in technique, material and local traditions has been quickly replaced by the struggle with less visible limitations. The ones that, at first sight, offer a less heroic battle. The local regulations of noise limitations, ecological building, pollution, floor area ratio, building heights, shading limits, and other rules that make it possible to live in the centre of activities but yet so attractively isolated.

These limitations shouldn't be given the opportunity to damage your otherwise perfect project, you should construct your scaffolding out of them. The mission of today is to fill the gap between architectural ambitions and regulations, to symbiotically connect maximum possibilities to maximum limitations. And once you get into them, these limitations offer an astonishingly rich scala of possibilities.

Next to being sophisticated in ecology and comfort, having easy access to all sorts of networks dominates the quality of nowadays urban areas. At first there are of course the telecommunication networks. The ones that make us global and local at the same time. The ones that make us live in the outskirts of Los Angeles, the centre of Paris, the New Guinean jungle and a suburb of Bern at the same time. The ones that have recreated us into a glocal human species. But how sophisticated these telecommunication networks may ever become, they will never make fysical connections redundant. As proves the site chosen at Bern: Bern-Ausserholligen, 'Gangloff'. What used to be a place to go to work to in the Bern suburb, has now, with the disappearing of the employment on the site, become an oversized traffic-island dominated by its Genius Logi. Not the visible qualities of the site, its Genius Loci, provides the project with its identity, but its logistics, the fact of being connected to all sorts of fysical networks, offers the site its strongest sense of place. Architecture can be used to illustrate this identity, it can create symbols for it on purpose. But architecture is better used to shape the results of these conditions in an optimized way. And better still, to generate the possibilities that hide themselves behind these conditions.

The holes in the urban fabric, the gaps in the city, like the Bern 'Gangloff' site, offer the best possible locations to rethink the appearance of urban connections to the fysical networks. And the ambition to create a housing area onto the traffic island this site is, brings on the need to combine limitations and possibilities to the maximum. To do so, we started by checking out all the rules concerning urban ambitions and regulations. This is much more site-specific than the mere fysical appearance of the site. Most of the time these rules carry a very logical explanation in itself. But they are often that much specific and non communicative with other conditions that in a way you could call them autistic. For instance the wish to exclude traffic noise and other traffic nuisance from the housing areas is very logical. But on the other hand the wish to live on the Gangloff 'traffic-island', and to benefit from this favourable traffic-junction, where traffic noise and nuisance is at its maximum, is logical to.

In conceptmanagement we look for ways to combine these mainly on itself oriented rules. To confront them with eachother, with an aim at the unexpected consequences that might have. We tune the ressonance that arises out of this in order to create, with this in its essence autistic instrumentum, a spectacular sounding orchestra.