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Comment by mayormcmatt | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of an apartment complex I saw last year, also in Sweden (north of Stockholm, in Norrtälje). Hard to see inside, but it's practically tropical, with palm trees and flowering plants, and all doors of resident's apartments let out into the garden.

https://goo.gl/maps/C7QAYeFm4bc9X28r9

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Those complexes are retirement homes. It's a very cool concept - they build a horseshoe-shaped apartment building and then glass over the central courtyard to create a huge indoor park for the residents. The apartments all face the indoor area, of course, which maintains a temperate/mid-terranean climate all year round. To the people living there it's like being on a permanent vacation in Spain. https://bovieran.se

There's an entire year-round indoor beach with bungalows and a small forest near Berlin: https://www.tropical-islands.de/en/

Better photos e.g. here: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2236995/The-worlds-...

I'm sure it needs plenty of energy, but I'd also bet the glass dome plays its role.

Found it online when was again thinking about how to live through the northern winter.

The building sure wasn't designed for that, however, it was supposed to be a hangar for the cargolifter airship. Went bankrupt with a lot of other things around the dotcom 1.0 failure era.

> I'm sure it needs plenty of energy

So much that it has its own power plant, as far as I know.

Environmental issues aside, pretty cool to stand there in swimming trunks when it's -10 outside and there's half a metre of snow against the glass walls though.

I’d not be surprised if they have a power plant. Not because they need a huge amount of electricity, but it’s a bit remote, so it might have been more economical to just build a generator hall than to get grid access and they can use the waste heat from generators to heat the building which substantially improves their energy efficiency.

Amazing. Photos of the apartments: https://www.erikolsson.se/bostader-till-salu/OBJ20965_171089...

This is a current trend. Here's another one being built:

https://www.fastighetsbyran.com/sv/sverige/Objekt/?source=He...

Thought this was cool: streetview from a certain angle shows the property before the development.

https://goo.gl/maps/NX7mEspb5PKABvXm7

My wife lived for many years in this "sandwich" of two apartment towers flanking an atrium:

http://rentcanada.com/wre/summerland

https://www.winnipegarchitecture.ca/77-university-crescent

Doesn't it really hot in the summers in Winnipeg? Is just opening the atrium enough to make it bearable during the summers?

Thanks, this looks pretty comfortable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DJq6uCZw1k

Very nice - too bad its not a food forest, though ..

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