ShabbyShabby Apartments

BACKGROUND
Munich is not always part of the avant-garde, but with the prices for living space it has reached European top level. Many people pay more than 50% of their income for their apartment. Residents without a continuous cash flow are always endangered having to leave the city. It is hard for small businesses to survive. Most artists cannot afford a studio. No one can afford to hang out in public space. Currently the real estate market drains our cities from everything we love about them, city life becomes shopping life, becomes work work work.
Shabbyshabby Apartments is not an answer to this problem, it‘s asking questions: How can we remain lazy, creative, political, helpful and Charlie? How can we show hospitality? Should architects go on building for the market? We need low cost housing in our cities. Space is not a luxury – space but a necessity! Housing should be a public value that relates to other common goods. We have to reinvent the idea of housing, ground and soil. We need new ways to build without using up the world’s resources. We have to find ways to to work and live together, to welcome people, to make experiments.

TASK
We invite you and your collective to invent apartments that everyone can afford. You design a space to live, which is free from speculations: studios, lofts, social housing, built in public space. You choose one out of 7 locations along the Shabbyshabby Axis. You will find everything from islands in the river to spaces under the bridge, from public parks to public parking – reinvent Munich next to the European Patent Office or on Munich’s most expensive shopping street. You propose a low cost design, with a new idea of what is private and what is collective, a use-what-you-find house, plugged into the city’s existing infrastructure built from as little resources as possible. A house for more than one person using up as little urban surface as possible. You send the concept to us by March 30th. A jury of experts picks the 20 most interesting proposals.
We organize everything you need and get all permissions. On September 3rd you and your group come to Munich and build your design in just 9 days. In September your apartment will go to use. The box office of the Münchner Kammerspiele on Maximilianstraße – Munich’s first address – will become the headquarter of the Shabbyshabby Apartments Company and rent out your apartment. When winter comes we will close the office and dismantle everything.