The Good Life

Abstract

More than half of residential buildings in Switzerland are single family houses. The houses and the land they occupy are the least environmentally efficient settlements yet remain the aspiration of many. Excessive energy-use from the house and the infrastructure that sustains it are just part of the widening gap between societal objectives of reducing carbon emissions and individual emancipation.

Objective

This semester, we shall stay near Zurich and redesign a normal single-family house. We shall search for the typical, not the exception as this is where we can find a new reality. We shall explore how architectural reinvention can turn the single-family house into a regenerative environmental type. The aims are social, spatial and natural. The means will be modest, circular, non-extractive and confined to what we find around us which of course includes the climate, the economy, the law and all the non-human species oblivious to property boundaries, but sensitive to appropriate habitat. The single-family house cannot be understood without the garden, which like the architecture it hosts, will be reimagined for new climates and ecologies. The urban population in the City of Zurich declined during the second half of the twentieth century as house building in the agglomeration increased. Good roads and increased car usage helped a building boom that peaked shortly after the commuter railway lines joined the agglomeration to the city centre with even greater ease and speed. Half the buildings in the canton of Zurich were built after 1961. The oil crisis of the early 1970’s provoked a first awakening to environmental performance in buildings followed by experiments with solar in the 1980’s. Architects in Switzerland, such as Ueli Schäfer, designed and built alterations to existing houses as well as new ones with new principles of passive solar design. These solar houses became the site of experiments. Vertical glazed winter gardens and Trombe walls added exotic touches to the basic typology. Careful use of solar orientation in relation to site layout provoked innovative solutions. The aims motivating solar houses could not be further from Gehry’s in Santa Monica but the means resonate; they share an interest in lightweight, efficient construction, bright daylit spaces with large open areas facing sun and sky. However, increase in the overall insulation of building fabric quickly replaced the exuberant spatial experiments of solar houses closing a short but inventive chapter in the story of the single-family house in Switzerland. Changing regulations meant that, by the 1980’s, most of the ordinary single family-houses in the Zurich agglomeration were built with insulated cavity walls and double glazing. However, decades later, those houses fall far short of the performance needed if these settlements are to meet the energy and ecological standards required today. Urban renewal has reversed the exodus from the city. The population in the city of Zurich is rising again provoking an ongoing demand in housing. Yet despite these changing demographic cycles, the single-family house is more popular than ever. A combination of Swiss protestant modesty and decades of low interest rates have enabled exceptionally high real estate value to be kept well hidden behind the apparent ordinariness of the architecture. We cannot simply change the paradigm with metropolitan values of equity and collectivism. The suburbs have shown themselves to be highly resilient to change by design and good intentions. We will need to understand the underlying social values that cherish and protect the dream life in the single-family house. Interest rates are rising alongside global temperatures. These affect everyone and everything. If new models are to be found, they will come from within where needs meet desire.

Content

To many, the single-family house represents the good life. To liberal urbanites, it represents the banality and wastefulness of the suburbs, which perhaps explains the lack of critical attention in architectural discourse. In fact, architects have condescended the suburb for decades ever since 1933 when CIAM declared it and all it contains “a kind of scum churning against the walls of the city”. And it is in part due to this deep-rooted snobbery that the single-family house developed its own design codes by mixing a cocktail of real estate value and aspirational taste away from the gaze of academic architecture. Yet, beyond the superficial cliches of dull conformity applied from outside, the suburban single-family house has and continues to represent a great opportunity to radically reappraise the architectural, economic and ecological contracts embedded in society and nature. In the late nineteenth century, the single-family house, laid out within a suburban settlement of equals, was the laboratory of utopian ideas. Later in the last century, suburban self-build and self-sufficiency found great opportunities after the oil crisis peaking in the solar houses of the early 1980’s. Class, race, gender, sexuality have been more mobile here than the urban gatekeepers of culture will admit. You may not find the revolution on leafy suburban streets lined by neat houses standing on well-trimmed lawns but you can never be sure of where the imagination of bored teenagers will lead. For good or ill, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon were invented in suburban garages. Bowie and punk are profoundly suburban. And while tech, music, art and literature have found fertile ground for experiment within the suburban idyll, architecture has kept it at arm’s length. One notable example stands out from the pack. In 1978, Frank Gehry started pulling his own ordinary 1920’s single family house apart in Santa Monica. The simple timber construction, common to almost every house in the American west, willingly released boards to his curious hand revealing the spatial sketch of a balloon frame onto which he would add others. Quickly, the carport became kitchen and structure became spatial. And the wilder his interventions became, the more typical the means he employed. There is nothing in the transformation that could not have been made by the original builder or a confident amateur. And there are no materials in the Gehry House that do not exist in blissful normality along that suburban street. Now, we should not be looking to Southern California for lessons in design for an age of climate change, but we can learn that the seeds of reinvention may be found in the object needing change. We simply need to look at it meticulously, to understand it, to pull it apart (literally in the case of Gehry or conceptually using tools of design) to put it back together in a profoundly new way fit for a different future.

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