PROJECT REPORT: SOCIAL & AFFORDABLE HOUSING


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streets on all sides, was the first challenge for the architects to grapple with.


Brief


The original brief included a parking garage for residents, and with a drive to include good outdoor space in the scheme, Mecanoo designed a raised, communal garden, retaining trees on the site, to cover it. This would have sat above a single-storey structure, and connecting low-rise apartment blocks. However, despite the practice winning the competition on the basis of this scheme, the client then changed the brief. They decided they didn’t want to include an enclosed car park, as they would reduce the number of apartments in favour of townhouses for families, with car parking space at street level instead.


Meandering


The architects had to “rethink the whole project,” says Van Gameran, and revisited the site, deciding to maintain the approach of retaining trees and providing strong landscaping to the scheme, combined with private outside space for residents. So in order to avoid separating the townhouses and apartments, and therefore unifying the


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scheme, the architects came up with the solution of a long, ‘meandering’ flat-roofed volume snaking its way across the slim site, and framing green spaces. This shape would keep apartments connected to those public external areas, which are also accessible for the wider community. The three-storey townhouses are arranged in a near-quadrant at the ‘snake’s tail,’ the volume closing to form a courtyard of back gardens.


The undulating frontages particularly benefitted the eastern flank of the S-shaped volume, along Princess Road, says Van Gameren, which could otherwise have been a forbidding ‘back side’ to the building. “We wanted to avoid it being an anonymous and not very pleasant space because there’s a pedestrian and bicycle route.” The resulting elevations present “fronts on both sides,” he says.


The building steps down from five- and


four-level apartments at the south to three levels in the townhouses to the north, the massing here helping The Aaben blend with surrounding 1930s housing. The apartment blocks, common in Holland, can create density that competes with tower blocks in a more open setting, Van Gameran asserts. He says they “create a more urban feeling


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The apartment blocks, common in Holland, can create density that competes with tower blocks in a more open setting


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