In building, two of the major crises are diametrically opposing each other: the social and the environmental. From a social perspective, we need more houses, especially affordable houses. In metropolitan regions like Berlin the situation is more intense than in rural areas: the Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, Bauen und Wohnen for examplecalculated a demand of 272.000 new apartments in Berlin until 2040. The questions is: where to build them? And from what?
       Because on the other side stands the ecological question: building contributes in all steps of its process chain massively to the ecological crisis, from exploitative extraction of natural resources over the emission of greenhouse gases for their transport and refinement to the destruction of natural habitats and sealing of grounds through the building itself, and finally the waste from all those steps as well as the destruction of buildings that have fallen out of use.
     There is no simple solution to this dilemma, but a clear task is deriving from it for planners and architects: buildings – if their construction can not be avoided by using what is already there – should be planned so they can be used better and more effectively over a long period of time, and for varying usage cases.
     Looking at housing, part of the dilemma is that though building methods are getting more eco-friendly or houses are better insulated, the average space consumption per person is ever increasing. And hence the savings through technical improvement are eaten up by increasing size. It’s called rebound effect. The two main factors for this increase are that households get smaller – from several-member-families to single households – and that usually the moment in a family’s biography, when a residence is being built or bought, is when the family has the highest spatial demand: as a nuclear family with young kids. It’s a pattern from Western, post-war societies that is being copied and replicated all-over in a globalized consumer society. The issue with this pattern is that the household of the nuclear family only exists for a relatively short period of time, for the longer period the parents live actually without their kids – if they stay together as a couple at all.
     That’s why this studio is focusing on Constellations Housing:A radical alternative Bauform, yet one that is actually fitting to the majority of Wohnformen (arrangements of peoples in space), that allows for long term adequate usage – some call it sufficiency – as well as freedom for alternative Lebensformen (arrangement of people) and kinship relations beyond the hetero-normative nuclear family model.
     With Constellation Housing, we are questioning the boundaries drawn around the agglomeration of rooms that is called apartment, and develop alternative approaches of linking spaces together without cementing one particular configuration. We will discuss our ideas of good life and good dwelling, and ask experts from other fields about their respective perspectives on housing and its urgencies. We want to find out what such a new type could mean for the city at large, and what challenges such a configuration brings both in architectural details, finance models, and current building laws. In short: we’ll rethink housing from its core, and we are looking forward to it.

Images 1 and 2: Constellations Vol. 1 Spring 2025, Yasmin Civan & Amélie Gropaiz