The “plateau de Kirchberg” is a quarter located near Luxembourg City. It went from farmland to office district in 1950 when the European commission and CECA settled there. The infrastructure, especially the John Fitzgerald expressway, was designed to facilitate crossing the area by car and the access to the thousands of daily commuters without considering the human scale. Since 1990, the public urban organization “Fonds de Kirchberg” is involved in the new development to bring diversity, smaller scale housing buildings and quality of life to the newcomers.
SeARCH was selected to be part of an innovative co-creation process on the “domaine de KIEM”, together with Witry&Witry, Areal, SGI and Betic.
This project is centered on pedestrian uses and need to adapt to the political incentive of Luxembourg to reduce car traffic. This translates into the position and dimension of parking garage as well as the dimension of the grid based on human needs for space rather than car size.
In the “KIEM 2050” project, the process is a major component of the design. We decided that the architecture itself should showcase it. The result is the development of different typologies - the “Duplex” typology, the “working and living” typology and the “Walkway” Typology. Spread across the 4 building according to sunlight and needs, they bring core variation to the 400m long street façade.
Each of the 170 apartment benefits of double orientation, private outside spaces and shared community spaces, weather it’s a duplex, simplex or working and living. The roof terrace, winter garden and various shared spaces will provide the inhabitant spaces to meet their neighbors any moment of the year.
As the project is located in a developing area, all the commercial spaces are not yet needed. We created a “working & living” typology that allows the ground floor to be used as housing during the first 5 years and then adapted to retail. This will create lively plinth at all time of the project development.
Circular economy, sustainability, flexibility of functions and creating a true community are core values in this new design process.
