The R21 Arkitekter studio includes 3 types of housing in the project. The first type includes 3 patio houses located on a small hill to the south overlooking a stream. The second type includes 22 semi-detached houses and the third 34 semi-detached houses of a larger surface area.
The ground floor is freed up thanks to an exterior volume that is used as a storage room, providing a rhythm to the set of semi-detached houses. To avoid continuous facades, the volumes on the upper floor are freed up, ensuring that the sun shines on the houses.
Constructively, the houses are resolved using a system of prefabricated wooden frame walls. To maintain the aesthetics of the area, grey or black wood tones and red or green metallic details are used, depending on the type of house.
Skogsnaret - Ski Hageby by R21 Arkitekter. Photograph by Mariela Apollonio.
Project description by R21 Arkitekter
The plot where the project is located is situated at the boundary between a rural area and the village of Ski. It is a low-density area dominated by isolated single-family homes, small in size and not aligned. The absence of sidewalks and urban furniture gives the area a very unstructured and sparsely dense character. The new regulations aim to change this situation by densifying the urban fabric and encouraging the development of paired housing types.
The project's objective was to "stitch" together the existing urban fabric, resolving the northern and southern boundaries, and establishing a new, more ordered and dense urban layout. We started with two essential premises: first, the streets are aligned in a staggered manner to reduce traffic speed; second, the homes are placed facing each other, with green spaces between them that provide a perspective backdrop from the streets.
The project involves designing and constructing 59 row houses, each with two floors. It includes three housing types: three patio houses located on a small hill to the south, overlooking a stream; 22 paired houses with a smaller footprint; and 34 paired houses with a larger footprint. The units are grouped into blocks of 2, 4, and 6 to ensure variety in the urban fabric.
An exterior volume, serving as a storage unit, is incorporated into each house, providing rhythm to the system and helping to free up the ground floor. For grouping purposes, it was decided to mirror the units so that the parking areas and storage units are adjacent to each other, thus facilitating car maneuvering and organizing the grouping as a whole. The volumes are connected using long parapets placed over the storage units. These parapets extend half a unit’s length to hide the cars as much as possible within the layout. This way, views from the streets are improved, and a more generous street width is maintained across the entire section of the project. On the upper floor, the volumes are separated from one another. This design aims, on the one hand, to ensure better and more uniform sunlight for the homes and outdoor areas, and on the other hand, to minimize the visual impact of a continuous façade of similar height and length in the immediate surroundings.
The structure of the homes is resolved with a system of prefabricated timber-framed walls. Half of the houses are in shades of gray wood with red metal trim, while the other half are in black wood with green metal trim, completing the composition and reinterpreting the local color palette, while striving to maintain a certain unity throughout the development.
