Archiprix 1998 | Lifestyle, basis for the new home

'Lifestyle, basis for the new home' offers not just an alternative to the new-build of urban areas such as those of the current Vinex operation; it can also be applied in the existing city. This comes from taking the lifestyle of the inhabitants as a departure-point for the urban design rather than income, household composition or age as is customary. Proceeding from the postulation that the individualizing of the human species has reached the point where the inhabitants of a neighbourhood are no longer able to relate to each other as a community, we might conclude that there is no reason for the neighbourhood itself to continue exhibiting a visual unity either. This individualizing process means that mutual understanding has vanished along with reciprocal communication, thereby sowing the seeds of anxiety and insecurity and generating an ecology of fear. The central issue of my proposal is consequently how to return the mutual commitment of inhabitants to their immediate residential setting and to public space. In the second instance, the scheme is a quest for urban diversity, a greater variety in the residential surroundings with the aim of enlarging one's freedom of choice.

However, there is still the old cohesion between inhabitants in terms of time structuring and consumer patterns. You could call it lifestyle, in which people recognize, seek out and communicate with one another. If lifestyles can form the foundation for contacts and mutual understanding, then they can also be the foundation for new residential settings, bringing with it the interesting perspective of involvement in the residential environment and a basis for urban diversity.

I used people from my area as models for the lifestyles. Together they present a fairly wide spectrum of the Dutch population. I then sought to ascertain what the relation was between a particular lifestyle and the different aspects of spatial planning. So I analysed the demands a particular lifestyle makes on the alignment of the residential environment with regard to work, school, facilities, infrastructure and landscape. I went on to design an appropriate daily living environment for each lifestyle, predicating my design upon the requirements of each group. The result, for each lifestyle, was a new house and a schematic site layout for a group of houses: the building blocks for a community. Finally, I determined what the relationships would be between the groups and which other functions they would need in their dwelling environment. This way, houses can be assembled into groups of ten to thirty; these in turn can be combined into neighbourhoods and ultimately into urban areas of some 7000 houses.

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Institution: Tilburg
Tutors: Hans Broes & Leo van Beek
Specialization: urban design