KARIN MATZ ARKITEKT

Tag: reuse

HB6B – one home

HB6B – one home – Stockholm, Sweden 2013

When the apartment on Heleneborgsgatan in Stockholm, Sweden was for sale in 2012 it had been used as furniture storage for 30 years. The previous owner had begun a renovation in the 1980s but fell ill and the apartment was left untouched until his death. Time had been frozen; wallpaper was half removed, only a few tiles and a kitchen faucet were sticking out of a wall, there was no electricity and a bathroom only with signs of rats as inhabitants.

In a city like Stockholm with an enormous housing shortage and with every square meter increasing in price by the minute, this story was somehow impossible to understand and resist.

The finished apartment is a result of a fascination for this; a try to let the previous layers and stories of a space live on and at the same time fill the requirements for the new story that will take place.

The apartment is 36sqm and the goal was to fit everything desired by the occupant. In this case: generous spaces, airy sensation, walk in closet, all appliances for everyday life, a large luxury shower / bath, different possibilities of movement, a space which could be divided when wanted. Finally it had to be LIGHT and INEXPENSIVE!

The result is an apartment divided in two parts. One where everything is part of one structure, which is based on the Ikea kitchen units. Everything in this part is completely redone with electricity inside the walls and with all surfaces painted white in order to bring in and reflect light. Here all the functions are squeezed in on top of, in-between, under and inside each other. Bedroom, kitchen, wardrobe and storage are all one.

The second part is left with things free-standing with all surfaces more or less as they have been for the last 20 years. The holes in the the walls have been filled in, loose wallpaper and paint taken down and electrical cables and outlets have been added running on the outside of the walls.

The bathroom becomes the connection between the two parts

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May 11, 2014
Blocket Mini

Blocket Mini – Reuse and leftovers, Saltsjöbaden, Sweden, 2009

In Sweden 80 % of the population has used the homepage blocket.se, which is similar to e-bay. In 2007 the total value of ads on the homepage was equal to 5,5% of the countries GDP. You could say that it is the largest shop in the country. In architecture this shop is not very present. The Blocket project looks into what architecture could look like if Blocket was the only catalogue of material available. The result is a building which consist of a mix of reused old materials and new materials left over from renovations or just wrong purchases. Windows are the main building element of the building since they are the most common and cheap material available on the site.

The Blocket Mini project is a built experiment based on a research project where blocket.se and the reuse of material in general were discussed, and an in-fill housing building (in Stockholm) was designed using the reached conclusions.

The Blocket Mini project consists of two rooms in a garden. One of the rooms is a boathouse (storage) and the other is a dining room/ bedroom. The house is 15 sqm which is the Swedish limit for building without a building permission.

August 21, 2012
Blocket House

Blocket House, Research and design project, Stockholm, Sweden, 2008 – diploma project

Blocket.se is similar to ebay and is Sweden’s number one second-hand market for everything from cars to textiles. In 2007 the total value of ads on the site was equal to 5,5% of the Swedish GDP. The project begun with the question; since Blocket is such a large part of the Swedish economy, why not use it as a material bank/catalogue for architecture in the same way that new materials are? And what would this mean for the architecture produced?

The project was divided in two parts:

1. Researching and cataloguing – A handbook was produced containing research of architecture using second-hand materials. What materials can be found, and what are the problems and possibilities with them? What projects have been done with reused and left-over materials?

A material catalogue was aslo produced with materials from blocket.se during one month, divided into categories.

2. Design of a small infill apartment building in central Stockholm using the catalogue and conclusions from phase 1. The proposal is a solid structure where the apartment layouts can differ depending on what materials are found on Blocket at the particular moment. The dividing wall are proposed to be mainly made out of windows, which is the most common building component in the Blocket catalogue since many people today change their old low-insulted windows into new and better ones. Since most of the old windows and walls found on Blocket usually have high U-value the house has an extra green house layer which helps create an in-between space, contributing to heating up the apartment and at the same time becoming an extra area 8-10 months a year.

The issue with the windows being poorly insulated creates an architecture where “the problem” becomes the main characteristics of the building enabling flexibility and an additional new space “in-between”.

Project Proposal

August 21, 2012