Bit Pazar

Situated next to the Donnersberger bridge, a residential building was designed to be transformational and to have the build-in capacity for future alterations. Therefore, the project explores the possibilities of a rich figurative structure that resonates the past into the manifold of the future realities. The surroundings are mostly office buildings and the main residential area is located up south and down north, which results in the building being one of the few residential buildings in the area close to the bridge. The footprint roughly resembles a meander shape, and it exploits the utmost potential of the plot. The ambiance under the bridge helped us choose the materiality of our building, and also gave us an impression of how space as such can accommodate an atmosphere that has a social quality. Construction-wise, the building adopted the Peikko Deltabeam System and divided it into different smaller grids with variable spans that were rotated and mirrored. Since the system allows for big spans and offers a beam-to-beam connection that does not require the presence of a column, some of the columns are left out. The structure is stiffened by concrete cores which are the main circulation area. The introduction of a certain typology in the residential area, different from the grid, allowed us to create a variety of diverse living spaces differing in depth and height, and apartments and social housing with different densities. We were particularly interested in the space created by the intersections of the volumes. We tried to imitate the shape of the footprint, by placing the rooms in a way so that the remaining public spaces such as working spaces, form a meander-like shape. For the facade, our preferences have arisen from a variety of different visual languages, materiality, and color choices. The juxtaposition of vertically and horizontally placed bricks and the simplicity of concrete elements drapes in a rhythmic facade, which results in both monumental and layered design. We used gray bricks with a blue undertone for the entire facade, except a concrete double-story ground floor. The window sizes differ on each floor and the smaller ones include metal pieces. The grids inside the division of the windows also alter on each floor, which creates an interesting approach resembling the actual grid of the building.