Architectural Design IV: "Small Pleasures of Life" (Spiro)

Abstract

We design residential buildings in the urban context of the city of Zurich. From a selection of construction sites, you determine the best suited for your project and develop a specific form of living right down to the materialization in detail. Inspirational buildings, whose architectural elements and spatial situations are the inspiration for your living ideas, serve as the starting point.

Objective

- Design of an urban residential building with a specific form of living that relates to the context - Getting to know standards and typologies in residential construction - Anchoring the project in urban space through intensive analysis of the access from the street to the apartment, development of your own access idea including the entrance situation - Taking a stance on the ground floor in the city dwelling - Understanding of the relationship between space, structure, construction and detail - Development of a spatial and atmospheric quality based on the approximation via component references and their materialization - Development of personal components in the interior and on the facade on a scale of 1:10 - High quality representation in collage, line (floor plan 1: 100, floor plan 1:50, detailed drawing) and model (interior model 1:20)

Content

Small Pleasures of Life is the name of a series of sketches by Alison and Peter Smithson. The episodic drawings of everyday living situations illuminate functional issues, but at the same time stimulate the senses and leave room for the imagination to visualize the in between ’. In the spring semester we deal with the topic of living. The architect's ultimate task is simple and difficult at the same time, it requires precision, hard work and imagination. Providing people with a home is perhaps the oldest, but certainly the most elementary task of architecture. The basic needs - protection and comfort - have changed little over time, but the way we live together has changed. In the past year in particular, the living range has acquired an additional function: In addition to living, space should now also be created to work. This new coexistence will also occupy us in the coming semester. In the spirit of Smithson's ‘Small Pleasures of Life’, we first examine the elementary situations of living and ask ourselves: What does it take for an everyday living situation to become a spatial experience? What makes an apartment so unique that I don't want to exchange it for a bigger one despite the limited space? Can I set up a nice workspace without needing another room? First you ‘reconstruct’ the floor plan and section based on pictures of selected interiors of existing houses and invent something new. By closely observing reference buildings and reading excerpts from the text, you will acquire a wealth of knowledge about the most diverse elements of a living situation - from the kitchen to the stairs to storage space. Building on this, you develop your own living idea and design an "ideal" apartment floor plan in which the situations studied at the beginning play a key role. Only now do you come to the construction site, locate your ’ideal’ apartment in the urban space and adapt it to the circumstances of the specific situation. We have selected four attractive building sites with different characteristics in the city of Zurich. We design new buildings on parcels that are under-used and whose urban conditions are already heavily influenced by the neighboring buildings. The challenge of increased density requires ingenuity and experimentation. With spatially surprising solutions, we want to prove that architectural wealth can make you forget confined spaces. Because compaction through more building mass alone does not make sense. Rather, by densification we mean a larger number of residents and a more diverse range of options on the same area. Only in this way is densification sustainable and contributes to the revitalization of the quarter. [...] For example, the architect's task is to create a warm, comfortable space. Carpets are warm and cozy. So he decides to spread a carpet on the floor and hang up four to form the four walls. But you can't build a house out of carpets. Both the carpet and the tapestry require a structural framework that keeps them in the right position. Inventing this framework is the architect's second task. [...] writes Adolf Loos in, “The Principle of Clothing”, 1898. In a recently published article, the architecture critic Sabine von Fischer also refers to textiles and demands of the apartment 'The cut of an apartment must fit as well as a dress; cuddly for comfort and with scope for movement ’. The character and shape of your floor plan lead to the choice of a suitable supporting structure and materials. The inherent conditions of the chosen construction method and the associated material as well as the parameters of the location form the framework for your design of a contemporary urban apartment.

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