1Imagine having your own living space in a new housing scheme designed exactly the way you want. Take another leap and imagine that you can choose your neighbours and achieve a perfectly balanced mix of ages – from eight months to 80 years.
That's what a small German community managed to achieve with multi-generational housing at Tremonia Park, on the outskirts of Dortmund in North Rhine-Westphalia. And the development is still a great success 10 years on, according to Thomas Scholle, one of its originators.
It grew out of an Evangelical church seminar in 1997 on the theme of “How will I live in the future?”. A small group of five or six then started meeting once a week to flesh out ideas on how they might build an ideal community on the brownfield site of a former coal mine.
The mine closed down shortly after the end of the second World War and remained derelict until 2001. “It was a stigmatised area that we called the Bermuda Triangle,” Scholle recalls. “Yet it is only 2km from the inner city – a six-minute bike ride – and at the edge of a park.”
Over the past decade, what used to be one of the city's most neglected areas has been turned into one of the most desirable in Dortmund. And unlike the repetitive doppelhausen (semi-detached houses) all around, every home in Tremonia Park is different.
Heatingcosts
Ranging in size from 50
-160sq m (538- 1,722sq ft), the units are pleasantly comfortable throughout the year because of their air-tightness and controlled ventilation. As a result, heating costs are significantly lower than what most households in Ireland pay.
None of the 21 units is the same as the next, as everyone involved in the building co-operative had their own requirements. “Some wanted three-storey houses, others split-level apartments and a few wanted space that could be adapted over time,” Scholle says.
Yet it all hangs together architecturally, reading as a pair of residential blocks, rising up to four storeys, with an open courtyard flanked by a communal building that contains a multi-purpose room for meetings or entertainment (it even has a piano), laundry facilities and a workshop.
Wide running balconies – more like external corridors – link units at the upper levels, and there’s also a glazed lift to bypass the stairs for elderly residents or the transportation of bulky items. Each home also has its own basement storage for lesser used items, like skis.
Of the 21 units, a third are allocated to families, a third to elderly people and a third to younger singles or couples with no children. And if people move out or pass away, the co-operative finds others in the same age group to maintain the balance of this unusual community.
The overall idea, Scholle explains was “to live very free in a part of the city – without barriers, fences or steps – in a neighbourhood you can rely on, where you know your neighbours.” And everyone has a job, whether tending the communal garden or doing maintenance work.
An outstanding example of Germany’s Wohnen Innovativ Realisieren (Realising Innovative Ways of Living) movement, Tremonia Park even offers residents an opportunity to “downsize” within the scheme, by sub-dividing their space to create two independent units.
The relatively small site was purchased from the City of Dortmund and the Evangelical church, and then had to be decontaminated to a depth of two metres – to make sure that none of the potentially dangerous residues of mining made an unwelcome appearance on the surface.
Ecologically sustainable
The build cost 10 years ago worked out at €2,000 per square metre for the entire scheme, which was designed by Dortmund-based architects Post + Welters in an ecologically sustainable way; it includes both solar PV panels and a gas-fired CHP (combined heat and power) system.
Because it was seen as a pioneering project, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia chipped in €30,000 to enable the fledgling co-operative to get it off the ground. “The City of Dortmund’s planning department were really open to the idea and gave us a lot of help,” Scholle says.
Residents of Tremonia Park use more bicycles than cars. Thomas Scholle himself “cycles everywhere”, even in winter. The area is served by two bus routes, while Dortmund’s S-bahn and U-bahn are both less than a kilometre away. There’s also a good range of schools nearby.
“Once a month, we have a meeting in the community room to discuss everything that needs to be done, and all that work is shared out,” Scholle explains. The same room, a bright, airy space with an outdoor terrace, is also used by sports groups, a yoga class and a choir.
Every year, Tremonia Park hosts a summer party for the whole neighbourhood that can go on till 5am. No wonder this award-winning scheme has inspired at least six similar projects, of which five are already built. But none of them are in Ireland.
At least not yet...
Frank McDonald’s visit to Dortmund was facilitated by the Goethe Institute Dublin
Nimble Spaces : Innovative living
Nimble Spaces is the catchy title of a forthcoming international conference in Carlow exploring innovative ways of living together and new cultures of housing that take into account issues such as “spatial justice” between social classes.
Speakers at the conference, which is planned for the Visual Centre for Contemporary Art on Friday, May 1st, include Teddy Cruz, an architect and activist based in San Diego, California, and Suzanne Hofman, of Baupiloten, in Berlin.
Others putting forward their ideas will include housing advocates Rory Hearne, of the department of geography at NUI Maynooth; Andrea Philips, of Goldsmith University in London, and former Green Party minister of state Ciarán Cuffe.
It coincides with a presentation at Visual of films, images and research materials from Nimble Spaces: Enabling Design, documenting long-term collaborations between artists, architects and disabled people.
The conference should appeal to architects, artists, researchers, students and groups or associations involved in housing, and it aims to generate “innovative thinking” about the next phase of Ireland’s development.
To book, visit visualcarlow.ie or call 059 9172400.
