Competition entry for student housing, 2012
The city of Lausanne applied for the 2020 Youth Olympic Games. The 1160 housing units of this competition will be temporarily used as accommodation for the athletes, before they will be given over to their primary use: student housing. As part of the EPFL campus, the project operates at city scale and reconnects the campus to a property north of it, which the school acquired for future extensions. The new park on the interior makes part of a green belt, leading from the shore of Lake of Geneva through the campus.
The borrwoing of form (here a running track according to IOC standards), offers a couple of interesting side effects, if applied to housing: a central park is created, around which the apartments are organized. On the inside, access balconies offer communicative spaces, a kind of streets in the sky, whereas the outside offers privacy with a view. The necklace-like linear arrangement guarantees each room a maximum amount of natural light.
In a sense, this is a renovation project re-designed before it was even built.
structural engineer: Schnetzer Puskas Ingenieure AG, Zürich
energy concept: Amstein + Walthert AG, Zürich
BÜRO Haller 