Sweco is transforming communities together with our clients. Designing a sustainable future is about having an idea about a sustainable life. In Denmark, Boligkontoret Danmark (BDK) is working with Sweco Architects to co-create a new community of affordable housing based on a calendar year, as a method and an architectural approach to sustainable living and community. The first of its kind is in development for Boligselskabet Nordsjælland, part of the BDK family, in northern Zealand, Denmark.

Using the almanac, the traditional location-based calendar; as inspiration, Sweco Architects and BDK are redefining how affordable housing can look and how they can grow a community. The Almanac housing community is based on a method and architectural approach that establishes a co-living community in socially inviting architecture.

The project highlights new ways of designing sustainable communities, and new approaches to community living.

Circular architecture to maximise sustainability and community

The circular community has been designed to encourage a strong relationship to the surrounding nature and allows activities to follow the seasons like an almanac.

Sustainability has been a part of the project idea from the beginning, from the choice of building the structures mainly in wood, to using prefabrication as a way of minimising waste and optimising the quality of the project. Even the circular shape itself, encourages social interaction between people while minimising the footprint, so there is more space for nature.

The ground floor unites the landscape and the community, and the upper part of the building features a continuous wooden deck structure to create individual homes with high spatial quality.

The housing communities are arranged in housing clusters around a common courtyard, and bound together by a larger urban landscape space, where communities of varying size and with varied content create a landscape connection across the buildings.

“Communities are often at their best if they are tangible and manageable. If they become too large, we easily lose the sense of cohesion and responsibility that is the prerequisite for us to share a place together” says Sebastian Soelberg, Sweco Architects.

Concepts of community have been integrated into the designing of the buildings with an intention to encourage interaction: the common courtyard on the ground floor includes orangeries, workshops, boat sheds, guest houses, and garden houses amongst other things.

In addition, The Almanac is being designed with input from future residents and people from surrounding areas to find out what functions the building should have. This approach means that a sense of community has started before the building is even finished.

“It is our experience that the community thrives best when it is not something that is expected of others, but instead stands as an alluring daily alternative. It is this awareness that has been our starting point in the work on the project,” Sebastian Soelberg says.