LIVING

Dear Readers,

What a summer it’s been! It wasn’t just the heat that occasionally made us break out in a sweat – the past few weeks also proved to be unusually eventful. In addition to jury meetings and award ceremonies, major events such as the Architecture Biennale in Venice and Expo 2025 in Osaka, we accompanied eleven interior designers to Helsinki for the INsider Award 2025. While the temperatures there were noticeably cooler, the packed interior design programme – including buildings by Alvar Aalto – and the exciting vote count of the prize winners had us work up a sweat nonetheless. You’ll find out who won on page 10! Countless events also took place across Germany as part of the Women in Architecture Festival (WIA); we’re currently compiling them for the September issue. Of course, we’ve also dedicated ourselves to this issue’s theme: Living. We’ve found more than 20 projects around the world – conversions, extensions, fitouts, new builds – which we’re delighted to share with you because they’re truly different: intelligent, space-saving, sustainable, playful, simple, consistent, cost-efficient, social… See for yourself from page 76. Professor Ingrid Breckner writes about particularly special living spaces in her contribution “Extra Räume”. In Hamburg, the opportunity for a community-driven addition to private housing practice was seized: a vacant ground floor was transformed into a neighbourhood meeting place – an alternative proposed by the Prototyp Wohnen working group, consisting of the architecture and urban design firm Projektbüro, Altstadt für Alle! e.V., and the AIT-ArchitekturSalon. Our Technical Solutions section focuses on barrierfree living. In a former sports shop in Valencia’s Fishermen’s Quarter, gon architects have created a 25-metre-deep, wheelchair-accessible flat for a paraplegic father and inclusion activist. And in our Change of Perspective series, trained architect Andreas Knapp reports on a very special project: in the old Rhine Church in Duisburg-Homberg, he has designed an unusual final resting place – a columbarium that is both poetic and fascinating. Are you familiar with the “Davos style”? If so, you already had a keen sense of interior design back in the 1970s! Benjamin Reding has penned a lovingly nostalgic homage to this furnishing style once reserved for the well-heeled. Brilliant!

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