new living in grünwettersbach
team: PASEL-K Architects
location: Karlsruhe-Grünwettersbach, Germany
perimeter: 5,5 ha
status: urban design
date: 2019-20
client: Municipality of Karlsruhe
collaboration: A24 Landscape, BuroHappold, IB Kraft, bscon
Increasing individual land use on the one hand and the responsible use of resources on the other hand require clear positioning in terms of density, mobility and high-quality landscape, especially in heavily populated suburban areas. Like hardly any other settlement area, ‚the suburb‘ is required to restructure itself and critically question known patterns and ways of life, or to convert them into sustainable and future-oriented forms of living together.
By consolidating the existing settlement area, the draft formulates a clearly legible peripheral development that redefines the transition from the populated to the unpopulated, landscape area of the adjacent natural area.
The project site, which mostly slopes northwards, is divided into six building plots according to the adjacent existing residential area, which are constituted as typologically independent entities and which are interlinked in a comb-like manner with the recreational and landscape areas of the adjacent orchards and fields by green, collective landscape areas. These green landscape fingers are each in the extension of the existing street network of Grünwettersbach and thereby explicitly increase the quality of stay in the already existing district.
Within the individual development areas, different apartment sizes are possible for different target groups and thus a high degree of mixing of the future residents is possible. The compactness in particular favors inexpensive forms of living, which should also encourage the influx of young families. The different typologies follow a flexible basic module and their size can be adapted to different requirements – also in terms of time – and to changing living space requirements.