Dogma

Urban Villa

The urban villa is a middle-size and multi-family house which since the 1800s has become a staple housing type in many European cities and beyond. Its distinctive characters are its density and speculative nature. The urban villa was born to combine aspirations to suburban living with the pressure of land costs. Despite its rather controversial reputation, the urban villa has been a (commercial) success also due its undisputable appeal to all kinds of dwellers. The goal of this exhibition is twofold: to revisit the rather elusive history of the urban villa, and to use this architectural type against its speculative premises, as the most appropriate form for affordable, public and cooperative housing.

This project follows the steps of a research presented in 1977 by the German architect Oswald Mathias Ungers, which focused on the possibility to use the urban villa as the best type capable of preserving the integrity of urban fabric while providing a form of dwelling comparable to suburban houses. Ungers noted how the middle-size of the urban villa—neither too big like a housing block nor too small like single-family house—were optimal for cooperative housing and to support the mixing of functions, like residence, office and retail. In this exhibition, Dogma pushes further Ungers’s project, by reclaiming the urban villa as the best form for a type of house in which many functions are socialized among the residents.

The exhibition is organized in two parts. The first, displayed on the walls, revisits the history of the urban villa in forty cases study from its origins as suburban villa to its implementation as distinct speculative multi-family type in European cities and beyond. The second, presented on two large tables, showcases a series of projects by Dogma which address the urban villa as both social and cooperative housing, and as pilot project for the densification of Antwerp based on the deployment of this type.