Philippe Rahm architectes

Convective apartments . Hamburg

Philippe Rahm architectes

The design of this condominium building is based on the natural law of Archimedes that makes warm air rise and cold air drop. Very often in an apartment, a real difference of temperature can be measured between the floor and the ceiling, a difference that could sometimes even be 10 °C. Depending on our physical activities and the thickness of our clothes, the temperature doesn’t have to be the same in every room of the apartment. If we are protected by a blanket in bed, the temperature of the bedroom could be reduced to 16° C. In the kitchen, if we are dressed and physically active, we could have a temperature of 18°C. The living room is often 20°C because we are dressed without moving, motionless on the sofa. The bathroom is the warmest space of the apartment because here we are naked. Keeping these precise temperatures in these specific areas could economize a lot of energy by reducing the temperature to our exact needs. Related to these physical and behavioural thermal figures, we propose to shape the apartment into different depths and heights: the space where we sleep will be lower while the bathroom will be higher. The apartment would become a thermal landscape with different temperatures, where the inhabitant could wander around like in a natural landscape, looking for specific thermal qualities related to the season or the moment of the day. By deforming the horizontal slabs of the floors, different heights of the spaces are created with different temperatures. The deformation of the slabs also gives the building its outward appearance.