With its one to three room, highly flexible apartments, flats, gallery lofts and rooftop flats, UNStudio and developer Bauwerk’s recently completed recently completed 'Van B' residential project in Munich offers an architectural expression of the ideas of the sharing economy, community creation and inclusive ways of living.
Located on the Infanteriestrasse, beside Munich's Creative Quarter and Olympiapark, and at the confluence of the three best districts in the city, 'Van B' not only caters to changing demographics and multiple family constellations, it offers indoor-outdoor living, communal spaces, shared facilities and a new highly flexible plug-in system that can make a 40m2 apartment feel like a 60m2 loft.
Representing a modern prototype for city living, 'Van B' offers residents a co-living space for working from home or social gatherings and a parcel box system, car/e-bike sharing, e-charging stations and a bike repair station.
UNStudio founder and principal architect, Ben van Berkel, explains that “now more than ever, we are seeing that many people desire and need to meet regularly with their families, friends and neighbours. But with neighbours in particular, such encounters are usually spontaneous and so they need to be facilitated. Architecture can create frameworks that enable people to meet, where neighbourhood communities can be shaped and where spontaneous encounters can occur.”
Stretching Living to the Max: UNStudio Completes 'Van B' Residences in Munich
While four different typologies create a diverse mix of apartments (ranging in size from 33 m2 to 168 m2), 'Van B' also challenges old conventions of square footage and fixed footprints to empower people to live in more flexible ways.
To achieve this, UNStudio, in collaboration with Bauwerk, designed an adaptable partition and furniture ‘plugin-based’ system that can be installed in all of the 'Van B' apartments, regardless of size.
“Now, more than ever before, we need to develop new living concepts that cater to the changing demands of our homes where individual spaces have had to become multi-functional, serving as offices, gyms, living rooms and sleeping nooks, all at the same time,” says van Berkel.
Residents can choose an individual configuration of plug-ins based on a catalogue of nine elements. Each partition can work in different configurations, as no matter which elements the homeowner chooses, and no matter how they arrange them inside their apartment, the modules will work together.
Explore the full project here.
Photo: ©Hufton+Crow