Green spaces and sun­flower-yellow façades

Luis Palacios: I have been involved with the project for over ten years. I came on-board back when I was still an architecture student. A few colleagues and I took part in the Europan 10 competition, where we had to develop an innovative housing concept for a future urban expansion area. Fortunately, we won the competition and were invited to design the master plan. The project team later became our architectural office.

Luis Palacios: The entire process took many years. At first the project was called “Gartenhof”, then “Gartenstadt 2.0”, then “The Commons” and finally “Wildgarten”. After winning Europan 10 with our proposal, we set up a design process that worked like a game. We created a game board and the rules of the game and in cooperation with various city stakeholders, as well as building groups, citizens and experts from different areas of urban planning, we played through different scenarios of how a residential area could be democratically designed. We calculated models and conducted numerous workshops. The game served as a tool to help the participants understand the needs of a city. Sometimes there are very clear differences and even opposing ideas, but with the game board, we were able to play through the scenarios in a practical way and design a democratic city.

Luis Palacios: Yes, exactly. In 2010, we began working on the master plan, creating a garden matrix to guide the building design. In 2017 we were invited to test our own matrix as architects.

Luis Palacios: It basically works like a chessboard made of gardens, where the planners are then allowed to play. Every building should have a garden that faces south. This was a fixed point in our planning, and the buildings behind it could be freely designed. Our sunflower houses follow this plan: The rooms with daylight, such as the kitchen and dining room, face the south (and the green space), while the bedrooms and washrooms face north. Not all planners followed the guidelines, but that’s the beauty of it! This fits in well with the neighbouring allotment garden settlement; this architecture emerged just as fluidly in what was more or less a regular garden matrix.