The Deckhouse
The Däckhuset or Deckhouse in Kallebäk Sweden was built in 1960 and it looks fairly unremarkable. But as far as I know it’s a one-of-a-kind, there is nothing like it anywhere else in the world.
The Deckhouse
What’s special is that it’s an apartment block of separate houses, an apartment/house hybrid. The structure of 3 concrete floors is totally separate from the individual ‘apartments’ which sit on top of those concrete floors. The houses do not heat or support each other, they are not part of contiguous building.
Put it another way imagine you were driving up a ramp of a multi-story carpark and found a good spot for your car and then just park a house there on top of the slab - now you have Deckhouse.
You can see how the houses are built on the slab as fully separate buildings
The Concrete plinth on which the houses sit provide the common stairwells and carry water, sewer and electrical shafts. The concrete frame consists of 3 concrete floors, 77.5 meters long and 13.5 meters wide, at a distance of 4 meters above each other. The floor plan is supported by a cast-in-place concrete frame with 10 meter long cantilever beams that spanned between two rows of columns.
In Däckhuset there are a total of 18 apartments. The height between the concrete decks limits the room height to about 2.5m, and each apartment is about 125m².
Erik Friberger was the architect responsible and has a solid body of work and was well known in Sweden. He designed in the Däckhuset based on some ideas about urbanisation and about offering more personalisation to people who could necessarily afford detached houses. Using prefabricated building parts. It’s well within the Functionalist tradition.
Däckshus in Kallebäck is an experimental project where the architect tried to combine the concept of an apartment block with a family house in a way that he figured would give the less affluent similar housing qualities as those who could afford to live in a detached house. All plan drawings were individualised after discussions between the buyers and the architect. While the housing units were supposed to be built incrementally as the families grew, most buyers chose to build their homes to the full extent at the first stage of construction. This was partially due to the fact that the building attracted buyers with a different economic background than planned. Because of this, the project did not fully comply to the architect’s intentions. Though, it still stands out as a symbol of the ideas of flexibility, prefabrication and will to experiment on the Swedish housing industry of its time - (Reuter Metelius, 2011).
Picture from ‘Behind the same facades’- ARKM.1986-26-062
Several other of this type were planned by Friberger but none were built partly because as an already old architect he would became sick towards the end of the completion of Däckhuset and it would be his final project. Partly because they weren’t really that well received and were fairly slow to sell. 1
The building did cause a stir at first though and became well known at the time. It appears to offer a few interesting opportunities. It’s concrete structures can be quickly mass produced with almost no regard for location or aestheic qualities. The prefabricated housing added can be specified and modified by clients fairly easily and cheaply.
Where housing is in shortage this seems a good solution for mass produced good quality more affordable family housing…so why did it not catch on?
Johan Johansson in his essay ‘Regeln och undantaget’ The Rule and the Exception supposes;
Neither architects, building contractors nor housing companies fundamentally have any interest in contributing to the undermining of their professional authority and position of power. Däckhuset abolishes the architect as expert and plan solver to instead hand over all power over the form, organisation and aesthetics of the home to the apartment buyers, thereby challenging not only the architectural profession, but the entire construction industry. It is a built visual example of how total individual freedom in each individual home can be combined with basically any form or any level of exploitation, it is an architecture that is no longer “architecture”.
Neither client, architects or builders really wanted it.
In Delirious New York Rem Koolhaas speculates about the ideal skyscraper using an image from Life Magazine in 1909.
The skeleton of the 1909 theorem postulates the Manhattan Skyscraper as a utopian formula for the unlimited creation of virgin sites on a single urban location. -Rem Koolhaas
Image from Life Magazine in 1909
Fifty years after this illustration the Däckhuset realised this dream as a reality but nobody noticed.
All photos from stadsem.se unless otherwise mentioned.
⚲ location: 57°40’47.5”N 12°01’02.3”E
According to information from those who moved in in 1960, however, there had been no direct rush to the plots once the sales had started, as the project was perceived as both peculiar and repulsive by many Gothenburgers. - from Johan Johansson: Regeln och undantaget↩︎