Project Credits & Specs:
- Architects: Arenas Basabe Palacios + Soyka/Silber/Soyka Architekten
- Photographs: Kurt Hoerbst
- Location: Vienna, Austria
- Area: 5100 m2
- Year: 2022
The SELMA AM PARK project sets its origins in the URBAN SOFTWARE proposal, awarded in the EUROPAN 12 competition in Vienna. This project put faith in an urban strategy where the process prevailed over the final result, by creating flexible support capable of reacting to the very diverse scales and conditions of its context.
The award allowed us to participate in the SIEMENSÄCKER planning design for a new 8-hectare residential neighborhood in the north of Vienna. The urban project was defined through a COLLABORATIVE PROCESS with a dozen expert offices in urban planning, architecture, landscape, mobility, energy, etc.
Once the Masterplan was approved in December 2016, the land owner (Austrian Real Estate) entrusted us with the design of 65 homes arranged in 3 blocks of different sizes (sizes S, M, L). The project uses different building and free space scales to connect to the different surrounding urban fabrics and to adapt to the topography and landscape. The scale of the buildings is nuanced through protrusions on the façade, which establish specific relationships with elements, spaces, and axes of the environment.
Concurrently with the development of the architectural project, we continue to be involved in the QUALITÄTENKATALOG, a group of experts who jointly define the qualities of free space, landscaping, collective parking, and the management of non-residential uses in the neighborhood. In this way, individual decisions are made from collective work, and vice versa: it is a design process that unifies the disciplines of architecture and urbanism, defining guidelines at the building and neighborhood scale simultaneously.
In the same way as collaborative planning, the architectural project is defined through 5 qualities:
- Bike-in city: The urban project is articulated through large collective garages, which remove the presence of cars on the surface. In this way, great prominence can be given to the bicycle, whose collective parking takes advantage of the marked topography of the land and organizes the relationship between the three residential blocks while opening up to the green space.
- Commons: the collective nature of collaborative planning design is also reflected in architectural design. Community spaces such as the large bicycle parking lot, a large collective kitchen open to the entire neighborhood, or a solarium terrace and associated play area, are arranged in the 3 blocks as spaces for community relations.
- In the park: a characteristic of contemporary Viennese housing is incorporated: each of the 65 homes will have an exterior room associated with it, in the form of a 10 m2 balcony, terrace, or garden, improving the quality of the home by opening it onto a green, natural and pedestrian-friendly environment. The houses are intensely interrelated with the tree-lined promenade, in which vegetation leaks in the spaces between the blocks. Private and public garden areas are intermingled, generating spaces and situations of variable scales and qualities.
- Servant cabinet: The house is organized around a server cabinet that houses all the services, storage spaces, and facilities inside. Thus, the living rooms are arranged towards the outside, reserving for the day area (living room-kitchen) the space that will enjoy, with its two orientations, the greatest number of natural light hours per day.
- Local materiality: The materiality of the buildings is characterized by their larch wood shutters on the outside and their paneling on the inside. As a consequence, it reflects the use of local construction systems and materials (construction using load-bearing concrete walls, external thermal insulation, selection of local wood, etc.), as well as the choice of native plants and trees, a necessary condition to preserve the ecological and sustainable quality in the construction process of the new SIEMENSÄCKER neighborhood.
The project description is provided by the architects.
About the architects:
Arenas Basabe Palacios is a young architecture and urbanism studio based in Madrid. Its partners Enrique Arenas Laorga, Luis Basabe Montalvo, and Luis Palacios Labrador are working together since 2006 and won about thirty prizes in architecture and urbanism competitions since 2006. They gave lectures in diverse institutions and presented their work and investigation in international exhibitions.
Soyka/Silber/Soyka Architekten
SOYKA/SILBER/SOYKA Architects was founded in 1993 by Georg Soyka, Wolfgang Silber, and Wolfgang Soyka. Georg Soyka has been the sole managing director since 2018, supported by five senior project partners. SOYKA/SILBER/SOYKA has always stood for architecture in the area of tension between innovation, aesthetics, and economic and ecological efficiency.
