This is San Riemo – an experimental, cooperative residential building located in Messestadt Riem in the very east of Munich. We designed it together with Büro Juliane Greb for the Kooperative Großstadt. It emerged from an open competition organised by the cooperative in 2017. The residents moved in in 2020.
We asked ourselves what expression a building should have that accommodates very different ways of living and tests collective coexistence in different forms and scales. The large ‘conservatory façade‘ visually links the 27 flats on five upper floors. Large windows at street level open up the building to the city. A foundation for child and youth welfare provides important neighbourhood work here.
Probably not to be overlooked: The longing for universality kept us very busy. With all its pitfalls. Repetition and the juxtaposition of things appear again and again. But also the breaking of order. Like here in the communal inner courtyard of the building.
The cooperative already envisioned a ‘breathing‘ house in the competition brief, where conventional apartment boundaries can be selectively overcome. With apartments that can expand and shrink – both in the short and the long term. We felt that the house required a quite rigid underlying structure for this purpose. We found it in a three-aisled arrangement, with access areas, kitchens, and bathrooms in the middle and versatile space chambers – each of the same size – on the outside. Diversity arises as these spatial units are closed off or connected to each other in different ways through walls and doors.
These are the accompanying execution plans. Each floor consists of equally structured fields. Within them are delineations, both within apartments and across multiple apartments. Where one apartment begins and another ends? Not easy to discern. The presence of a door in the wall doesn’t always clarify this. Some doors remain closed for a long time, only to suddenly be moved daily.
This is what the flats looked like shortly before the residents moved in. The beams on the ceiling structure the rooms: like a ghost, they mark out where walls could be. Several of these pre-drawn room units can be combined to form larger spaces. Doors underneath the beams create cross-connections, sometimes smaller, sometimes larger.
On some floors there is a room that we have called the ‘stairwell room‘. Three to four flats are connected to it. All the flats share this room. For some flats, it is also an access room, i.e. you have to cross it first to get to your flat. It is something between a communal hallway, living room, storage room, cloakroom or even a fitness room.
And here are photos showing the various ways the roughly 14 square meter rooms at the facade are used. Just large enough for a living room, suitable as a dining room, spacious for a child’s room, snug with a double bed and wardrobe. Nevertheless, we like the idea of rooms that are really not at all customised to their function.
At some point in the planning process, we realised that the basic structure of the house with its room units defined by the grid of beams was fairly stable – and that residents should decide for themselves how to divide up their flats. We sent everyone a blank plan of their flat together with a cut-out sheet for walls, doors and furniture. We incorporated (almost all of) their wishes into the further planning.
We had already created these collages during the competition – with the kitchen as the central access area and a system of beams that proportion the rooms. The beams are the promise that all rooms retain their quality, even if new walls are added or removed.
Different types of kitchens, always in the centre of the floor plan: you can see that every kitchen is not just a kitchen, but also a cloakroom and distribution space to all adjoining rooms (including the bathroom!). Many kitchens also have direct access to communal rooms.
All west-facing rooms have access to the ‘winter garden‘ layer. As the allocation of rooms to flats is fluid, there is no separation in that loggia space between the residential units. We were told that children use the zone as a sneaky way to visit neighbouring children on the same floor.
We previously constructed a mock-up of the winter garden facade ourselves – made of wood, in Leipzig, together with our neighbour. We wanted to spatially and physically examine what we had actually drawn. And we wanted to convince others. We mimicked the steel profiles using MDF and plywood, with edge radii cut by the router. For a moment, a piece of San Riemo stood in our garden in Leipzig before we dismantled it and rebuilt the mock-up at the construction site in Munich.
There is a large entrance hall on the ground floor. Almost like an extension of the street from outside. All stairwells and lifts are accessed from here. There is also a residents’ café, a communal launderette and parking spaces for pushchairs. We were interested in how everyday care work, such as laundry washing, can find its way out of the flats and directly into the community.
The residents’ café is located right next to the main entrance – you automatically walk past here. The same goes for the community workshop, which the residents have set up right next door.
There is a large communal garden on the roof with beds planted by the residents. We tried to visually destroy the rather ugly cubatures of the stairwell superstructures using geometry and colour…
We particularly like doors, gates and windows. They form small projects in themselves. Here the main entrance door, doors to the courtyard and the rubbish room doors.
This is a timber post and beam façade. With white corrugated sheet metal as weather protection. We were interested in the planar versus the linear. That’s why fields are as large as possible and lines as thin as possible.
The building has (only) two staircases. They have been given two different colours. The residents specified the colours: purple and sky blue. Good choice, we think.