Stockholm studio Andreas Martin-Lo?f Arkitekter has completed a cluster of affordable apartment blocks in the Swedish capital, featuring facades with alternating opaque and transparent sections.

Snabba Hus Västberga is the second project designed by Martin-Löf Arkitekter that uses offsite prefabrication and standardised materials to reduce the cost of constructing apartments for young people on waiting lists for permanent rental contracts.
"The apartment buildings achieve sophistication at a low cost through the careful use and adaptation of standardised materials and methods," said the architects. "The project offers a timely solution for the growing housing shortage in Stockholm."

The first application of this process was an apartment complex completed in 2014 in Knivsta in the north of Stockholm, where prefabricated-concrete structural elements support apartment units that are assembled offsite. In Va?stberga, a neighbourhood to the southwest of central Stockholm, the studio arranged six buildings containing 280 apartments along the edges of a site that shares a city block with existing housing and a park to the north.

The inner facades of the connected structures feature large glazed surfaces and balconies overlooking a communal central courtyard.
Corridors that wrap around the outer edges of the buildings are enclosed behind alternating translucent polycarbonate panels and openings containing vertical aluminium louvres.
The inner walls of th...