There’s a New Apartment Tower Designed To Help You Make Friends
High-rises aren't the most ideal set-up for making new buds. Until now.
High-rises aren't the most ideal set-up for making new buds. It's not every apartment-dwelling crew that's lucky enough to undertake wacky antics in the hall, eat from each other's fridges and bond over Ugly Naked Guys across the way. You're more likely to encounter your neighbours through the wall — outlandishly vocal bedroom activity, raging Avicii-fuelled parties, World Cups. It's all pretty negative, fist-shaking stuff, usually moderated by your tired, tired landlord. But what if some friendseeking architecture firm just wanted us to all get along, even design friendships between neighbours? It all has do to with space.
Dense, high-rise housing can be an isolating place to live, even though you're surrounded by hundreds of people and their better-than-yours cooking aromas. Vertically-stacked apartment living often lacks those common areas where you can bump into your (often hundreds) of neighbours and hang out — courtyards, gardens, front porches; Actual House areas — resulting in the whole nod-and-smile, awkward silent elevator ride and subsequent, perpetual avoidance of eye contact. But you might have more in common than you think with mean old Mr Macgillycuddy downstairs.
Tired of these missed, loneliness-curing opportunities and taking cues from corporate setups, a presumably friendly Belgian design firm has come up with an inspired solution. C.F. Møller Architects and Brut Architecture and Urban Design have made social interaction the main goal of their new mixed-use high-rise design in Antwerp. That's right, an apartment tower designed to help you make friends.
C.F. Møller's 24-story plan is all about mini-communities. Grouping together similar apartment types (family homes with other family homes, raucous students with other raucous students), the plan throws together residents with typically matching day schedules and increases the chance of bumping into each other for mad chats, recipe swaps and sugar borrowing.
Cooking and eating alone's definitely another opportunity for buddying up in apartment living — nothing like a sad, tear-dressed Caesar for one. So the team have included a communal dining area in the design, perfect for post-work vents and cheap pot luck dinners, as well as a roof terrace for those beer-fuelled new friend-making chats.
Nothing sparks a new friendship faster than similar interests. Cyclists can event meet other veloheads in the bike repair repair facility. Pet owners can let their four-legged friends roam free all year long in the triple-height indoor garden and students can compare notes from outdoor study sessions in the massive balcony space.
While C.F. Møller haven't released a completion date yet, estimates look toward 2017 for the building's red ribbon ceremony. Until then, why not give your neighbours a chance instead of a passive aggressive note? Could be an everyday Ryan Gosling on every floor.
Via Fast Company.
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