“Boschgaard” Residential Complex

Boschgaard is the largest example of building new residential projects by using almost exclusively repurposed materials Superuse Studios has been able to accomplish. It is also an experiment in building not only for, but with a community. That group started as a group of squatters and now forms a community fully supported by the local government and housing corporation while still acting as a self-sustaining collective.

Located in the city of ’s-Hertogenbosch (Den Bosch), the capital of the Dutch province of Brabant, Boschgaard consists of 19 collectively managed apartments in three buildings that resemble abstracted and enlarged versions of the traditional, gable-roofed row-houses surrounding the project. In addition, the former neighborhood center, which is what the squatters had “broken” (the Dutch word is kraaken, and is used to connote squatting by the act of breaking into and opening up under-utilized buildings), is now used as a community facility where the collective interacts with its neighbors. The final part of the complex is a one-hectare plot a stone’s throw from this small group of structures that was made available to the collective for self-supporting agriculture.

Superuse’s quest to increase the circularity in the residential building process – the use of locally sourced materials that can be reused or upcycled, and then their application in a manner that means that they can be later reused for other structures – began with their Villa Welpelo in the northern Dutch town of Enschede in 2009. Since then, the firm has increased both the scale of their efforts and the variety of materials that they use in their buildings. After breaching the 80% threshold with the similar transformation of a squatting neighborhood in Rotterdam in 2022, they say that in Boschgaard fully 84% of the buildings is made from recycled materials – as opposed to the Dutch average of 8%.

The...

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