Housing, Merksplas

Avant-garde Belgian architect Renaat Braem (1910-2001) once called Belgium the ugliest country in the world. The chaotic spatial planning and urban design that provoked that pronouncement still prevail, but there is now greater scope for a more orderly strategy and more daring architecture. One exponent of this reformist approach is TEEMA, which distinguishes itself from mainstream Belgian architecture by its idiosyncratic, optimistic philosophy: 'If the world is not so beautiful or pleasant, our buildings try to respond to that in an uncomplicated fashion. We do not have a typical style, but all our designs radiate a certain optimism,' says Edith Wouters, who founded TEEMA together with Paul Vandenbussche in 1997.

TEEMA, which refuses to be pigeonholed, is active in several areas (architecture, interior design, urban design) and recruits employees from a wide range of disciplines: interior architecture, product development, urban design, preservation and cinematography. Despite appearances, the practice's name is not an acronym, but the Finnish word for 'theme', chosen because the architecture and nature of that Scandinavian country was and remains a source of inspiration for the Belgian duo.

In Merksplas, TEEMA was asked to design eleven social housing units, plus a semi-underground car park. The site is part of an outlying social housing district earmarked for densification. From the outset, the aim was to create a new typology. According to TEEMA, the flight from the city demonstrates the failure of traditional apartment building and one way of addressing this is to build atypical social housing outside the city where the landscape becomes the resident's garden. Rather than being imprisoned in a particular style, architecture should strive for morphological efficiency and as such fit into the landscape as much as possible. In TEEMA's Merksplas project the architecture functions as a visual corridor: the landscape enters the dwellings through the open front, rear and side facades. Instead of the usual pseudo-farmhouses or anonymous apartment blocks, the architects opted for contemporary row houses that feel and look like detached houses.

More precisely, TEEMA created six rather austere, two-storey volumes separated by open outdoor staircases allowing views through to the green area at the rear. Simple row houses are thus transformed into freestanding houses. Side windows maintain a visual connection between these intermediate spaces and the apartments. The living zones are at the rear, facing south. The bedrooms are on the north side. On the top floor southern light enters via skylights that enhance the sense of space and draw the landscape into the dwelling. In order to escape the traditional social housing typology, TEEMA not only opted for freestanding dwellings, but also for a variety of materials: pre-patinated zinc, natural zinc and an orange brick and matching ceramic roof tile to temper the severity of the zinc. According to TEEMA, the austere design provides unity, while the different colours provide diversity. The semi-underground car park is filled with light and air. Contact with the landscape has not been forgotten here, either; it is possible to catch a glimpse of the surrounding greenery and reed pond from the garage.

TEEMA had to take account of budgetary restraints in the construction of the houses. Hence, the floor slab of the car park doubles as the foundation slab for the entire building. There are no gutters or vertical rainwater pipes. Rain runs down the facade into the gravel pit at the foot of the front elevation and into the car park gutter. Inside, the architects saved space by using cupboards as room dividers. Solar collectors on the roof provide hot water for the bathrooms. The houses were occupied in October 2005.