Making home: Hjemfællesskabet

The project explores how homeless people can be re-integrated into society by offering a more holistic programmatic approach than the current system provides. Through research and an interview with an employee at a homeless shelter, the project develops from addressing the systemic and spatial challenges presented. The new co-living community focuses not only on providing shelter, but on offering opportunities for education, work experience, and mental wellbeing. The proposal investigates how a new co-housing community can become a platform for strengthening social ties between the residents and the surrounding community, thus becoming a vital part of the neighbourhoods social fabric.

Two out of ten of the homeless who are given a new home through the Housing First initiative move back to a shelter or to the street within the first year, and some of the challenges found are loneliness, mental health issues and a lack of passion outside of substance intake. Hjemfællesskabet is a project aiming to catch those who fall out of the current system.

On an architectural scale the project unfolds as a transformation of the Holy Cross Church in Copenhagen, to (re-)use the existing large structure of the church for a community of co-existence between the openness of the Evangelical-Lutheran religion and the life created by the new residents, facilities and visitors within this context. Here the residents will live in a social environment and help each other, while being in close connection to their neighbours, the local neighbourhood, the city as a whole and have daily interactions with the society around them.

Instead of going through a serial system of steps of first treatment, then education, then work experience and moving to a new home whenever they clear a step, while waiting to be allocated an individual home by the municipality, hjemfællesskabet will give the residents all this simultaneously. They’ll work with improving the different aspects of their lives parallelly so the consecutive improvements in all aspects can hopefully become mutually reinforcing and motivate the individual to keep pushing towards their goals and dreams.

Tutor: Tamara Kalantajevska

^ Phases

^ Exterior visualizations

^ Interior visualizations

^ Sunken garden visualizations

^ Cross section zoom-ins

^ Longitude section zoom-ins

^ Axo zoom-ins

“If the churches took half the money that they was making and gave them back to the community, we’d be a’ight. If they take half the billions that they use to praise God and gave them to m***********s who need God, we’d be a’ight. Have you seen somebody’s goddamn churches lady? There’s ones that take up a whole block in New York. There’s homeless people out here. Why ain’t God letting them stay there? Why these n*****s got gold ceilings and shit, why God need gold ceilings to talk to me? [...] So that’s wrong religion, I believe in God I believe God put us wherever we wanna be at, then it make sense that God would put us in the ghetto, that means he wants us to work hard to get up out’a’here, that means he’s testing us even more.”

- Tupac Shakur, VIBE Magazine interview 1996