Halde 07

The site is a spoil heap. Between 1892 and 1961 the foundry two streets east tipped its slag here, and the ground has been settling ever since. Nothing could be founded on it without going through it, so the building stands on 47 piles driven to rock at 19 metres and carries its own ground floor as a bridge.

That constraint set the plan. Load is collected into four vertical cores and nothing else touches the earth. The facade carries no weight, so it is thin: 180 mm of prefabricated recycled-aggregate concrete, board-marked on site with the formwork left rough where the panels meet.

Every dwelling has two orientations and a room that can be given to either neighbour. Twelve of the thirty-two have been reconfigured since handover, which was the point.