Browsing by Subject "Apartments"
Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Restricted Aging in place : adaptive reuse of existing apartments as barrier-free living spaces for elderly in residential buildings in Berlin : a guideline for a redesign and a practical application integrated into a showroom concept(2020) Arlt-Herrmann, Kathleen; Ebert, Carola; Pöğün-Zander, Yüksel; bachelor thesis in Interior Design"The central research question is: What are the design criteria for barrier-free access to existing apartments that undergo adaptive reuse with a contemporary and target-group oriented approach? During the last decades, the society's age structure turned in Germany because of fewer birth rates and the rising number of retirees. Hence elderly have to rely on financial, health-promoting, and political support. Governmental departments, health insurances, and housing companies have to find new opportunities for those parties concerned. Though finding the right consultation services and getting the right information is an exhausting process. Besides financial or bureaucratic challenges elderly are facing more and more physical, sensory, and cognitive restrictions in their daily lives. According to their hindrances, barrier-free access to their living environments is insufficient. As a result, they have to move to another residence or district with a lack of social contacts and a familiar living environment. A minority even move into care homes because of limited apartments with barrier-free access. The development of new living concepts is indispensable for people with low hindrances who can live independently with small adaptations. Furthermore, the costs could be lower than the care in care homes. One approach can be keeping the elderly in their accustomed environment with an adapted design of the apartments, so-called 'Aging in place'. This document assists as a guideline, which measures could be used for refurbishment to a barrier-free living space in existing living environments adapted for the people concerned and their relatives. Though, it cannot cover all aspects of a redesigned living environment, such as the financial spectrum, the overall building environment, for instance, entrance facilities, or interdisciplinary concepts for the elderly. Accessibility is a term that is known as prevalently. The most common barrier-free measures in the interior are floor transitions without thresholds and bathroom supportive elements. The thesis examines such measures and approaches for adaptive use in other living environments and people with other hindrances. Additionally, the guideline includes contemporary barrier-free design methods that focus on materials and colors and might significantly influence the well-being and mental health of the inhabitants."Item Restricted Cluster apartments in Berlin as a future living model(2020) Ulm, Ashley; Larsen, Sigurd; Pöğün-Zander, Yüksel; bachelor thesis in Interior Design"Berlin is attractive for its career and study opportunities, many green spaces, mobility, leisure, and cultural facilities. The majority of Germany's citizens still want to live in the city. However, living space capacities are becoming rare and rent prices are increasing. The fact that merely 15.6% of Berliners own a condominium reveals that only a small population can afford property (Investitionsbank Berlin, 2019). The housing market has hardly adapted to demographic changes in recent years, including an aging society and a shift away from the nuclear family household structure. Most of Berlin's inhabitants live on their own. Of a total of 2,026,300 households in Berlin, there are 1,0719,12 single-occupant households (Investitionsbank Berlin, 2019). Due to the lack of alternative housing forms and the desire to design something according to individual ideas, initiative projects evolved. These projects were mostly realized in cooperatives. Group-initiatives develop personal responsibilities and identification with the place. Building communities often accept collective liability for spaces beyond their individual living spaces. This creates lively neighbourhoods that can offer new opportunities to all residents (Ring, 2013). A good example is cluster apartments. This special form of housing could be considered as a housing concept for Berlin. A cluster apartment is an assembly of living units in a communal flat. It combines the advantages of private living with those of a shared accommodation Wohngemeinschaft (WG). These flats consist of several private residential units with one or more rooms, including a private bathroom and optionally a kitchenette. Additional communal areas consist of one or more living areas, cooking and dining areas, and bathroom as well as guest rooms for flexible usage. Each cluster apartment is an experiment in terms of planning, organizing, and building. The current projects are testing alternative approaches and transforming living models, experiences future projects can profit from. However, as these projects are at an early stage of development, there is little long-term experience and little evaluating research at this time (Prytula et al., 2019). Therefore, it is the aim of this bachelor's thesis to investigate how cluster apartments correspond to the current and future economic and ecological needs of Berlin's inhabitants. Beyond that, this thesis will examine how the interiors of cluster apartment spaces can be designed both conceptually and spatially to contribute quality living spaces in Berlin."Item Restricted Communal living : a contemporary adaptation of Berlin's 'Gründerzeit' buildings in the 21st century(2020) Martín, Javier; Pöğün-Zander, Yüksel; bachelor thesis in Interior Design"With the beginning of the 21st century, Berlin and many other industrial capitals are experiencing growing interests in alternative living models, such as co-living. [...] While a number of innovative pioneer projects have been arising within various cities over the past decades, the main housing markets are only adapting slowly towards these paradigm shifts. As a result, a severe lack of contemporary adaptation within residential architecture is experienced today and urban housing structures lack spaces in which residents can come together, share their daily lives and resources with each other (Kries et al. 2017, 41). [...] With about one quarter (27%) of Berlin's population living in tenement buildings, built before 1918 (Berlin.de 2011), a main challenge and at the same time of great impact, would be a contemporary adaptation of old domestic tenement buildings within the city. The appearance and urban life of Germany's capital is shaped by tenement buildings from the Gründerzeit era, erected during the time of the industrialization. They hold great cultural and historic values for the city and its residents and offer various spatial qualities that are no longer to be found within new rise buildings. However, with major changes occurring in our modern living models, these building structures with its emergence of around one hundred years ago, do not fully meet contemporary needs any more and lack spaces in which residents can come together, allowing them to be part of a community. Through a qualitative and contemporary adaptation of such buildings, the values of their old construction and their inimitable charm could be preserved and at the same time constructive living solutions for the contemporary urban lifestyle could be created. This thesis therefore aims with its research, to investigate the development and relevance of co-living in the 21st century, in order to understand contemporary needs of urban societies. It furthers seeks to find qualitative solutions for the implementation of communal spaces into Berlin's existing Gründerzeit tenement buildings, with the aim to make use of a widely available resource. This practice intents to create high qualitative urban living spaces that meet society's demands for community life and which simultaneously promotes the differing lifestyles and needs of today's society."Item Restricted Contemporary interior design solutions for co-living in Berlin(2020) Wöhe, Lucia; Larsen, Sigurd; Pöğün-Zander, Yüksel; bachelor thesis in Interior Design"Architecturally speaking, there is no specific design or style in order to establish a home for a shared housing community. Each co-living project depends on the individual needs of the residents, which again affects the design approach. When it comes to the design, one important subject revolves around the question: what is private and what public? Usually, shared living is based on the idea to reduce privacy and emphasise on the communal aspect, in order to generate space that is qualitatively more valuable. Public and private boundaries must be constantly negotiated according to developments in society, e.g., changing lifestyles, household types, work modes and mobility. Clearly, both sociological and design factors matter in the process of establishing a co-living space and community (Schmid 2019, 15-22). In this research, the following questions are going to be explored: How can contemporary interior design solutions for co-living respond to future social needs in Berlin? How will that shape the conception of living? This research aims to establish an understanding of the spatial organisation of co-living in relation to the social needs of residents. In order to portray and analyse different projects that have already been established, it will be important to explore different forms of co-living concepts in detail. To give an appropriate insight into the current co-living situation in Berlin, the research will concentrate on the past decade only. Although co-living can be seen as a potential solution for certain issues in society, the following research will also reflect upon the concept in a critical way."Item Restricted Preserving, exposing, adapting : modernising historic structures with the respect of materiality and heritage(2020) Nylund, Paula Emma; Martín, Javier; Starck, Adrian von; bachelor thesis in Interior Design"Society is facing one of its biggest challenges of the century: The loss of identity of urban areas. With the world's population constantly growing, the need for new buildings are constantly increasing. About 8 billion people populate the planet in 2020. This number has more than doubled within the last 60 years. With this intense need for space, some are resorting to drastic measures. Old, historic structures (from before the industrialisation), that seem unusable are being torn down and replaced by new, modern structures. These actions cause towns to lose their identity by replacing traditional architecture with modern structures. The optical values might not be the only things that are lost when a structure is torn down. Its materiality might also be demolished in the process. Nevertheless, it seems as if the way people used to populate houses does not suit modern architectural needs. Rooms are too small, modern technology is missing and too few windows exist, are just a few of the issues that seem unsolvable within old structures. Is there no way to conserve existing structures while modernising them at the same time? This research analyses a proposed 3-step approach to find a solution on how to conserve historic structures while respecting the materiality and heritage, while at the same time modernising them to today's architectural needs. By combining three conservational philosophies: 'preservation', 'exposure' and 'adaptation', one might find a suitable solution to keep the heritage of a building while satisfying modern architectural needs. This approach has been applied to an apartment of a building from 1545 and gives insights to technical installations and conservational methods to verify the proposed solution."Item Restricted Room for collision : the key role of communal spaces in multi-generational co-living projects(2020) Ebert, Anna; Ebert, Carola; Larsen, Sigurd; bachelor thesis in Interior Design"[W]e are facing two drastic, and harmful, developments: a population that grows both older and more socially isolated. From an architectural point of view, I believe co-living projects, in particular, can offset loneliness in the elderly population, and isolation throughout. For my thesis, I have visited multi-generational co-living projects in Mainz and held interviews with current inhabitants, future inhabitants, and the architect of the projects, which are all built and run by one social housing agency. The examples I have visited and based my design on follow the so-called Bielefeld Model [...]. The Bielefeld Model would like to eradicate the notion of separate retirement homes, and rather build a functioning community that brings the whole neighborhood together. As strong as this concept is, during my interviews and accompanying research, I have discovered some room for improvement. The communal room element of the architectural examples I am working with is, so far, limited to a neighborhood café run by the inhabitants. [...] I believe for a community to outgrow its architectural borders and have a positive and community-creating influence on the greater neighborhood, it has to be very strong within itself. This is why I am proposing to add another layer of semi-privacy to the co-living project; something that can exist between the full privacy of individual apartments and the extreme exposure of the neighborhood café. I am proposing more communal rooms - rooms that are not open to the public, like the neighborhood café is, but reserved for use by the internal community. These concentric circles - home, to common room, to café - allow people to comfortably grow their sphere of public life. I believe this work is vitally important because intergenerational co-living projects with well-designed communal spaces carry a strong potential to bring together our fragmented society. [...] The findings of this paper are based on the comparative analysis of selected literature on the topic of co-living. I will first state the history of co-living and offer thoughts as to why it has repeatedly failed. I will then present the Bielefeld Model as a contemporary and promising case study. This case serves not only as a general example of multi-generational co-living, but also as the foundation of my design project. In addition, I will introduce various other contemporary case studies, with a particular focus on their public room program. For a better understanding of the particular case I built my design project into, I conducted interviews with the architect of the building, as well as with current and future inhabitants of comparable projects. In these interviews, I have uncovered perceived flaws and ideas for improvement in multi-generational co-living projects, rooted in the Bielefeld Model."Item Restricted Sustainable design solutions for micro-apartments in Berlin : facilitating the separation of functionalities in single-room apartments by means of flexible divisions(2020) Hillmann-Regett, Jan; Tibus, Alexander; bachelor thesis in Product Design"Micro-apartments are a trend which is rising in the metropolitan cities in recent years. These single-room apartments are in high demand by young professionals due to their lifestyle. Research has shown that because these micro-apartments have no separation of different functionalities, people search to solve this problem. People use standard solutions or products to solve. It generally comes with the problem of hard to carry it around when they move and high prices. This study aims to discover further possibilities to design a divider that is more suitable for the specific target group, including literature research and interviews. The design aims to cover sustainability, portability, and affordability and make it more available."