Adaptive Reuse for Sustainable Student Housing Preservation and Residential Quality in the Transformation of Eklandagatan 86

Abstract

In a time of rising greenhouse gas emissions and increasing pressure to reduce the environmental impact of the built environment, together with a housing shortage and a growing student population, adaptive reuse emerges as a strategy capable of responding to several of these challenges simultaneously. This thesis investigates the transformation of Eklandagatan 86, a former institutional and university building in Gothenburg, into sustainable student housing. The thesis explores how the existing building can be transformed into student housing and how its existing conditions can inform design decisions and spatial possibilities. It also investigates the tension between preservation and residential quality through co-living as a student housing typology. The work is based on a theoretical framework established through literature research, reference project analysis, focus group insights, and building analysis. From this foundation, a set of design principles is developed and tested through seven design prototypes, evaluated against the principles using a structured evaluation matrix. The results show that the building rewards co-living as a typology, but does not solve it, since the cluster sizes it accommodates most naturally exceed the scale at which shared living remains socially functional. In this sense, co-living solves the building’s logic more than the building solves a qualitative co-living solution. The tension between preservation and residential quality is not binary, and the strongest outcomes emerge not from optimizing a single typology but from combining them. Preservation functions as a complement, not a constraint, and the right choice is not about the degree of change, but the coherence of decisions.