use: residential building with 27 units and a collective ground floor
collaborators: SUMMACUMFEMMER
location: Munich
country: Germany
‘San Riemo’ is the first housing project realised by the KOOPERATIVE GROSSSTADT, a cooperative founded in 2015. It is designed as a spatial infrastructure that allows for pluralistic forms of living within one robust basic structure. The possible plan of the apartments is outlined by concrete beams on the ceiling: room-units have a neutral size of 14 square meters – just big enough for a living room and not too lavish for a child’s room. Larger rooms are created by combining several room axes into one unit.
The large kitchen in the center of every unit is not purely a place for cooking, but at the same time a living entrance hall and large distribution space that allows for a non-hierarchic organization of the surrounding rooms. The spatial variety arises as the structural grid is filled with non-load-bearing drywalls. The residents themselves decided which grid axes should be filled with walls, how open the connections between rooms are, and where doors are positioned. By adding doors between appartments, the possibility of swapping rooms with neighbouring flats was implemented in several units. Many appartments also share larger rooms with neighbouring flats: sometimes up to 4 to 5 appartments share a common room that can be freely programmed.
The structure allows for flexibility in the near or far future: neutral room sizes, rooms that can be switched back and forth between different units, and the possibility to add or remove partition walls within the concrete skeleton. The heart of the house is an open communal area on the ground floor. This 4 metre high hall extends from the main entrance as an inner street through the whole house. It serves as a circulation space, laundry room, communal kitchen, library, stroller storage, workshop, and much more besides. On the way to the stairs and elevators you meet neighbours doing their laundry, baking cookies together and exchanging books.
San Riemo received the “DAM Preis 2022” of the Deutsches Architekturmuseum!
