a room above the bike racks
In Municha small one timber the structure now rises above the bicycle racks outside a pale-colored residential building pink framework that elevates a room-sized volume into a pocket of street space normally given over to passing traffic.
It’s called ZuHaus, the temporary construction by architect Clemens Hoyer transforms a familiar roadside into a place that can be held, occupied, furnished and experienced by the people who live around it.
The project will run from May 29 to July 31, 2026, as a real urban laboratory or Reallabor, which will ask what can happen when a parking lot is treated as a shared neighborhood infrastructure. Instead of treating the street as a leftover space, Hoyer gives it a small architectural body, open enough to invite use and concrete enough to make the question visible.
The team asks:Can a parking space support work, music, play, learning or conversation?In Haidhausen, the concept is being tested on a full scale.
images © Jens Bloom
Clemens Hoyer tests the park space as communal architecture
Built on stilts over the existing bike racks, the ZuHaus keeps the ground level largely intact while adding a new layer of use above it. The gesture is simple, almost literal: where the city already stores mobility, architect Clemens Hoyer fits a room.
Its wooden construction gives the installation the recognizability of a tiny house, while its exposed position keeps it tied to the rhythm of the street, with pedestrians, cyclists, residents and passers-by moving around it throughout the day.
The structure is designed as a flexible shell, with its interior shaped through participation in time. Furniture workshops bring residents into the creation of the room, while roundtable discussions open up questions about housing, density and public space.
Other formats test how the room behaves under real-world conditions, from informal gathering to focused work. Through surveys and conversations, the project gathers responses to spatial qualities, programs, and atmospheres that could help such places gain long-term acceptance in dense neighborhoods.
the work can be found on Metzstraße from May 29 to July 31, 2026
a PhD project becomes a road experiment
Munich’s ZuHaus is part of Clemence Hoyer’s PhD research, entitled ‘From Generic to Specific Space’. The densification potential of parking in dense urban neighborhoods using the example of the Franzosenviertel in Haidhausen, Munich, TU Darmstadt Department of Building Design and Construction under Prof. Felix Waechter.’
The research begins with an immediate urban pressure: in compact cities, housing is scarce, open land is limited, and existing roads still hold areas assigned to stationary vehicles for much of the day.
The project proposes a change in the way these areas are read. If certain activities are moved out of private apartments and into shared neighborhood rooms, domestic space could be rearranged from within, with a home office making way for a children’s room, or a small apartment gaining access to functions it cannot contain on its own.
Visitors can book slots through the project’s website, check the program and take a four-minute survey about their experience, making the usage itself part of the survey.
Architect Clemens Hoyer designed the structure as a true urban laboratory for shared street space
the street as a room under negotiation
With the support of the Department of Town Planning and Building Regulations of the City of Munich, District Committee 5 Au-Haidhausen, HRW Vollwandsysteme, KliuKork Sprühkork and WH-Schilderdienst, the ZuHaus stands between architecture, urban planning and public art.
Its scale is modest, but the question it poses is larger than the structure itself. In a city where every square meter counts, Hoyer’s room above the bike racks gives visible form to a conversation that is usually conducted through politics, diagrams and blueprints.
Placing the experiment in the middle of Haidhausen, the project transforms a familiar street situation into something people can enter and assess with their bodies. Its success will come less from a complete picture than from how residents use, dispute, ignore or return it.
For design, this makes the ZuHaus a particularly useful kind of prototype: one that treats public space as something shaped through possession and housing as a question that can begin right outside the front door.
The room can be reserved by the residents of the building for work, study or socializing
furniture workshops and public talks allow space to change through participation
surveys and conversations collect responses from people who use or encounter the room
