Helix-House: Introduction

The intention of this essay Helix-House is simple to deliver a new proposal for a huge appartment house. Since the first Charte d'Athene in 1933 by  Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) huge appartment houses have been the key components for future urban living. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athens_Charter

"CIAM demanded that housing districts should occupy the best sites, and a minimum amount of solar exposure should be required in all dwellings. For hygienic reasons, buildings should not be built along transportation routes, and modern techniques should be used to construct high apartment building spaces widely apart, to free the soil for large green parks.

-Mumford, 2000, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960, The MIT Press, p85"

Le Corbusier , https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier , probably the main writer and promotor of the Athens Charter, got his first chance to construct such an apartment building after the second world war, more than a decade later. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit%C3%A9_d%27habitation, the Unité d'habitation. It was the break through of Le Corbusier and gave him the oportunity to replicate his idea several times. the following pictures from Wikipedia show the builing on pilars and an internal passage.

Le Corbusier's utopian city living design was repeated in four more buildings with this name and a very similar design:

• Unité d'Habitation of Nantes-Rezé in 1955,
• Unité d'Habitation of Berlin in 1957,
• Unité d'Habitation of Briey [fr] in 1963,
• Unité d'Habitation of Firminy-Vert [fr] in 1965.

All of them were oriented with the building's long axis running north–south, so the units face east-and-west.

The whole concept was very rigid, starting from the main building material, rought-cast concrete béton brut , massive due to lack of enforcing steel in the after-war market. " The building contained 337 duplex apartment modules to house a total of 1,600 people. Each module was three stories high, and contained two apartments, combined so each had two levels (see diagram above). The modules ran from one side of the building to the other, and each apartment had a small terrace at each end. They were ingeniously fitted together like pieces of a Chinese puzzle, with a corridor slotted through the space between the two apartments in each module. Residents had a choice of twenty-three different configurations for the units. Le Corbusier designed furniture, carpets and lamps to go with the building, all purely functional; the only decoration was a choice of interior colors that Le Corbusier gave to residents." 

In 1966 Gustav Hassenpflug  https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Hassenpflug and Paulhans Peters published a critical review of the apartment hous architecture after the war: Neue Wohnhochhäuser (new apartment builings) in three types of construction: Scheibe, Punkt and Hügel ( cuboid, tower and terrace), proposing to overcome the limits of the cuboid, favorized by le Corbusier.

The ideas of the Athens Charter have been developped nearly one century ago with oher premises. There was no idea of the coming Climate Crisis caused by the Greenhouse Gases and CO². The global communication, economy and politics have been quite different. Therefore I take the challenge to develop a kind of complementary, contempuary concept for a huge apartment builing by the Helix-House.

Work in progress.