Lounge culture

Location

Once upon a time, a modest two-story commercial building with three window axes and a red-tiled roof stood here – in the Ostertor quarter, east of the ramparts of the Hanseatic city of Bremen – nestled inconspicuously in the suburban, cozy array of 19th-century buildings. Now you think you are looking at a street view from the hip Netherlands.

What has happened? Quite simple: The corner is new. Now a narrow box with a tower-like appearance stands here, inserted excitingly into the ensemble, pushed confidently deep into the side alley. Its façade skin is formed by long dark aluminum sheet panels, whose edges support the slender flatness of the house pane with its vertical folds. Their irregular folds work with visual sophistication, creating a delightful graphic structure that at the same time brings the seemingly freely distributed window openings into an aesthetic context.

Casino futur

While one can still read the floor division of the basement-less four-story building on the basis of the four glass openings set in three sizes of the southwest-facing street front, one puzzles over the internal division on the basis of the stimulatingly irregularly set windows of the alley side. This formal communication idea supports the utilization concept underlying this small but elaborate architecture: Called “Casino Futur,” the building contains a combination of “think tank” and “community hub” on the first floor and the two upper floors. In concrete terms, the intention is to invite the residents of the quarter to a new, more intensive and certainly also productive way of getting together, to which end the “salon”, which is furnished on the sidewalk level and has inviting glazing on two sides, is intended to contribute first and foremost.

Finally, on the 3rd floor, another apartment was created – a loft, whose room height rises to almost 6 meters. To it is assigned the large corner window, from which there is a view over the roofs of the busy neighborhood. The dissolved edge of the house allows a special spatial experience.

As a designer, how would you briefly and succinctly define the term “new work”?

GME Architects Group: For us, it means adapting the fundamental concept of work and life to the current individual demands of clients and employees. With flexible and sustainable structures open, communicative and centrally accessible, not only to think conceptually about the respective situation, but also to implement it actively and to adapt it again and again to the life structures or experience possibilities, in order to live a conscious and responsible interaction with each other in the long term.

There is currently a lot of talk about sustainability: Do you have a basic approach to this?

Yes, we try to create buildings with lasting concepts that are flexible and changeable in use and sustainable and timeless in their building components and basic structures. The spatial structures should be convertible into different uses with little effort, and we see accessibility as a holistic concept. We are constantly working on the realization, implementation and further development, also in a wide variety of projects for public and private clients, and have also been a member of the DGNB (German Sustainable Building Council) since 2014.

Is it possible to respond to the home office trend in office design, or should there be a clear separation between private and office interiors?

For us, it is important in every task to find a solution that is suitable for the client and to meet individual requirements with different concepts. In our opinion, there is no dogmatic solution for this. Instead, it is always a matter of taking a close look, adapting to very personal wishes and needs, working out a design that fits the location and then implementing the project together in the creative process.