As a prototype for modern city dwelling, Van B is designed to cater to changing demographics and multiple family constellations.
With its highly flexible apartments, outdoor and shared communal spaces, and striking facade, Van B offers a new form of urban living. Flexibility has become more important to people today than sheer size. With Van B we introduce new ways to make the footprint of an apartment more flexible. The architectural strategy was to devise as many different ways as possible to reconfigure an apartment. To achieve this, we designed an adaptable partition and furniture ‘plugin-based’ system that allows homeowners to use the space in a 40m2 apartment almost as if it were a 60m2 loft.
The Van B plugin system allows you to easily change the use of the same floor space in a matter of seconds, making it possible to transform a room from a generous office into a cozy living room, or a bedroom. Van B challenges old conventions of square footage and fixed footprints to empower people to live in more flexible ways. Quality meters become more important than square meters. The flexibility lies in the fact that each element can work in different configurations and that the resident can choose an individual configuration of plugins based on a catalog of nine elements. In order to achieve this, a grid was devised upon which each element is based, as whenever one element is opened, the back of the other one needs to be adjacent to it. This means that no matter which elements the homeowner chooses, and no matter how they arrange them inside their apartment, the modules will work together. With the possibility to reconfigure the apartment to their immediate needs, the homeowner can choreograph their space around their day, instead of the other way around.
