Living

Dear Readers,

When it comes to housing, the main issue at the moment is shortage. Politics and the construction industry are fully committed to meeting this challenge. For architects and interior designers, it goes without saying that solutions must be found to meet these demands. The list of ideas is as varied as the requirements and the budgets: from Tiny Houses solutions to multi-storey apartment buildings and conversions to new and old buildings as well as annexes. We have collected a wealth of remarkable examples for this housing issue that do not look like shortage at all. The concept of transforming vacant office space into attractive living space has already been implemented in various major German cities. Our author Rainer Müller has looked at a few of them and warmly recommends this effective form of conversion (p. 128). Subsequent densification is particularly appropriate wherever gaps in the urban space remain unused for years. How these can be filled is impressively demonstrated by a supplementary new building in London (p. 106), which only at second glance is not a reconstruction of the existing building, and by the conversion of an old metalworking shop in Stuttgart—or what was left of it—into two extremely comfortable residential units (p. 142). And because shortage management is not our main concern anyway, we also show unusual living situations, not exactly inexpensive, but all the more inspiring—like the show apartment in Shanghai (p. 100) or Penthouse F in Vienna (p. 112). My visit to Villa Lemke in Berlin’s Alt-Hohenschönhausen district was also extremely inspiring (picture above). The last house designed by Mies van der Rohe in Germany before his emigration to the USA in 1938 was built in the Bauhaus style in the early 1930s and has served as an exhibition pavilion for modern art since 2002. And if you are planning a visit to the Architecture Biennale by November, don’t miss the opportunity to visit the island of San Giorgio Maggiore to see the Vatican’s first Biennale contribution (p. 11). If you can’t walk anymore, you will be helped (picture below). We wish you a sunny summer!

Best wishes
Petra Stephan, Dipl.-Ing.
Chief Editor
Architect