Entwurf V-IX: Home Alone (GD O.Lütjens/T.Padmanabhan)

Abstract

In the design studio EVERYTHING YOU NEED, will work on new cooperative apartment buildings along the train tracks between Zurich and Olten.

Objective

In the design studio EVERYTHING YOU NEED the students will learn to develop innovative ideas for cooperative housing on sites along the train tracks between Zürich and Olten. Centred around the principle of Sufficiency the students will learn to formulate an architectural position with regards to questions of urbanism, housing typology, exterior and interior expression and possible new ways of living together. The students will learn about architecture as a language of form. They will learn how a building’s specific expression can be translated into an innovative, sustainable way of construction. Drawings, photographs, models and model photography as well as oral presentations and short texts will play an important role in the design process as well as in the semester’s final presentation.

Content

Today, the question of affordable housing, the problem of increasing social isolation and the urgency of climate change have become inseparable. Sufficiency, a sub-principle of sustainability is aiming at replacing the unlimited use of resources with a new understanding based on using only the necessary means. If the idea of sufficiency is to reduce the consumption of capital, material, and energy, how does this lead to a new way of constructing and inhabiting a building? Is a sufficient architecture one of lightness, simplicity, and clarity or one that is composite, challenging, and complex? Will sufficient architecture be an initiator for ecological innovation and for social change? In the design studio EVERYTHING YOU NEED, will work on new cooperative apartment buildings along the train tracks between Zurich and Olten.

Resources