About the Book
Press Release by the Publisher
Affordable housing is an ongoing political issue. Local authorities have repeatedly been striving to set international standards for these important construction projects since the 1920s. In the tradition of a socially oriented housing development today’s focus is on not only on setting out political, but also architectural standards. The catalogue of buildings presented in Housing for All shows more than 130 current residential buildings, all adhering to the principle of affordable housing. The floor plans and key figures are supplemented with large-format photos and thanks to the easily understandable diagrams are presented in a comparable manner. The analysis of this data provides the reader with an abstracted and comparative view of current building initiatives in regard to matters such as different aspects in construction, building typology, ownership models or the allocation of social areas.
The 440-page volume is furthermore complemented by ten concepts of affordable housing that asserted themselves in the second phase of the “Housing for All” competition. For this competition Frankfurt am Main’s Department for Planning and Construction joined ranks with the Deutsches Architekturmuseum (German Architecture Museum) and the ABG Frankfurt Holding. Renowned architecture bureaus from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands and France were chosen from the entries and asked to provide concepts for the development of construction sites in Frankfurt’s Hilgenfeld district. Their contributions provide new and innovative impulses for the discourse on affordable housing that will influence projects far beyond this specific German city.
The competition “Housing for All” sees itself as a procedural model for the creation of high-quality affordable housing on the Hilgenfeld construction site of north-west Frankfurt. In the first phase of the competition more than 130 residential buildings from the past four years were submitted that adhere to this principle of providing affordable housing. The funding of 40 per cent of the residential units on the Hilgenfeld site will be publicly subsidised, the remaining privately funded rental housing will be offered at reduced rates.
The design concepts for the Hilgenfeld that were chosen in the second phase of the competition will go on show at the German Architecture Museum in Frankfurt during the exhibition “Housing for All: building 1:1”, which runs from April 13 to June 23, 2019.
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