Zorgwoning Huis aan't Laar

At the Huis aan ‘t Laar care home, 51N4E explore this at three distinct scale levels. The project was designed from the inside out. A great deal of attention was paid to the effect and experience of perspective. Various places for accommodation grow out of the folds in the building. Internal spaces are split up, fragmented and layered. The building, which is part of ‘Huize Monnikenheide’ in Zoersel, houses two communities of eight young adults with learning disabilities. The plan consists of an irregular broken figure with eleven obtuse angles. The eight rooms, situated alongside the periphery of a central hall, are formed by the inward projection of the contours of the figure – or was it conceived the other way round? The wet areas are not in the corners of the rooms, but in the middle. This makes the rooms, which are angled along the outer wall, U-shaped. A different shaped window sits in each section of the angle. This lends each room its own unique atmosphere, view and light conditions. The design also introduces a dynamic spatiality on the larger scale of the building as a whole. The central corridor bends between the peripheral rooms. At one point, the internal and external walls converge to provide a view to the outside. More centrally, the internal figure is widened to form a stairwell in which daylight enters from above. Two mirror-image staircases create a layering effect within this ‘space-within- a-space’. Each staircase begins next to one of the two living rooms positioned opposite each other on the ground floor and provides access to eight rooms. In this way, the two groups are interwoven via a double circulation system that generates a constantly shifting sense of communal living. The guests live together, yet apart. The house possesses none of the traditional character of an institution. Instead, it offers dynamism and a residence in which scale, and carefully articulated places, create a homely and comprehensible building.

Author: Caroline Voet. This text has been published in the Architecture Review Flanders N°11. Embedded Architecture.