Germany – end of life apartments: new lease of life

What to do with a tower block that no one wants to live in? The solution: pull it down, slice it up, turn it into pleasant, green family homes.



The Guardian reports that it looks like many other desirable new homes: a light, spacious two-storey villa with a cool, geometric simplicity. But architect Herve; Biele‘‘s first built project, in Mehrow, just outside Berlin, is more than it seems. In its previous life, it was a grim communist tower block in an East German housing estate.



Apart from new fittings and a new coat of render, this is a genuine recycled house. And it‘‘s good news for all concerned. It cost its owners about 30% less than a conventional house would have. Its basic structure took just seven days to put up. It saves a considerable amount of energy in construction materials, and therefore has impeccable environmental credentials. And it has prompted a rush of inquiries to Biele‘‘s small practice.



In addition, Biele‘‘s solution could provide relief for what has become a national headache. While Britain is scratching its head over how and where to build all the new homes it needs, Germany has the opposite problem: a housing surplus. There are an estimated 1.3m homes currently standing empty, predominantly in the east of the country. Better economic conditions in what used to be West Germany have resulted in an exodus of workers from the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). As a result, parts of the east resemble surreal ghost towns made up of elderly citizens, closed-down factories and deserted apartment blocks. Most of the latter are what is known as plattenbauen, or “slab houses”.



The plattenbauen were the GDR‘‘s one-stop solution to its gargantuan housing problems – the architectural equivalent of the Trabant car. Made from prefabricated concrete panels, they were churned out fast and cheap in a handful of blankly functional, almost indistinguishable designs, usually five to 11 storeys high, arranged in long, relentless blocks. They are so ubiquitous in the east that it‘‘s sometimes difficult to know whether you are on the outskirts of Leipzig or Dresden. But at the time when central heating and even internal bathrooms were still a rarity, these plattenbauen were regarded as highly desirable. People often got married and had children at the earliest opportunity so they could move out of their parents‘‘ homes into their own new plattenbau.



But when the Berlin wall came down, and the east got to see what standards in the west were like, nobody wanted to live in a plattenbau any more. In addition, hundreds of thousands of new “western standard” homes were built in the east, so nobody had to live in one.



So what to do with them? Plenty of plattenbauen were modernised and are still occupied, but the government plans to demolish at least 350,000 homes in the next five years. Until recently, the only course of action was to grind the concrete to rubble and use it for road building, but projects like Biele‘‘s have put the legacy of the plattenbau in a different light.



Biele worked on a study of these concrete panels, most of which are less than 20 years old, and concluded that they actually get stronger as they dry out with time. They built a test house to prove the panels‘‘ structural viability, after which 32-year-old Biele set up his own practice, Conclus, with his brother Joel, specialising in recycled homes. The materials for the house in Mehrow came from an 11-storey building in Berlin‘‘s Marzahn district, which the government is paying contractors to dismantle.



“We don‘‘t have to pay for the panels – they‘‘re garbage,” he explains, on site. “We just come here and say, ‘‘We want this one, this one and this one‘‘; and then we cut them to shap