Living and working under the same roof

Usage: living and working
Plot: unknown
Built-up area: 1,000 square meters
Storeys: 2 + roof
Year of construction: 1962

Residential building with carpentry workshop
Size of flat: unknown
Inhabitants: 2 + the carpenters and any guests
Number of bedrooms: unknown

The couple B lives and has worked under one roof in their carpentry on Hamburg’s fringes. Their house allows to observe how social structures and economic working processes have influenced the architecture of a workshop more than half a century ago and how it can be transformed and re-used over the course of time. This house contains one room, for instance, that was built adjacent to the flat and in which there is space for a huge table seating 14 persons to celebrate the annual Christmas dinner for the carpentry. In addition, there is a flat for the master joiner which used to be inhabited first by one master joiner, later by the couple’s children. While planning the building, the company and the family were both considered as equally important; this relation has changed today. Noise and dust characterise the daily rhythm, interrupted by two breaks of half an hour at 9am and 12:30. Built in 1962, the house embodies the wood industry; all wood works have been carried out by the owner and realised according to the high standards of the early 1960s. The living and working spheres enable both exchange between the two and separation of the different areas by switchable connections.

(Melling/HCU 2019)