ARCH_500-600 Options Studio: ‘Studio Gmür’

Our lives increasingly take place in cities where two-thirds of the world’s population currently live. Our cities are growing, creating big challenges but also many possibilities. In the best-case scenario, cities are engines of growth and cultural incubators. Crossing points for ideas, they are innovative places that inspire their inhabitants to be mentally alert. They can be models for democracy and for a multicultural coexistence.

 

The future of humanity lies in cities. The city of the future will offer housing at affordable prices and city-compatible traffic and transport, despite the increasing shortage of land. It will be sustainable, offering appropriate infrastructure (schools, hospitals) along with urban open spaces and green areas.

 

Even the population of Zürich—the largest city in Switzerland—has been steadily increasing over the last 20 years despite the lack of available building plots. As cities cannot create new areas suitable for construction, there is only one way to create supplementary housing space: increase the density of the existing city fabric. This raises the question of how and where high-rise construction is possible.

 

The general principles for (spatial) planning of high-rise buildings in the city of Zürich define where and—above all to what height—construction is permitted. These general principles are currently under revision as Zürich faces the challenge of planning and building compact and affordable apartments.

 

Students in Studio Gmür faced all of these questions. The exercise for this studio was to design compact high-rise housing in six different urban locations, along a spatially interesting street, answering to the need for densification, but also to architectural questions concerning the address, access(ibility), structure, ground-floor plans for different needs, facades/elevations, private and public outdoor spaces, and materials. Attention was also paid to the increasingly important “common social spaces,” such as laundries, winter gardens, gathering places, and roof terraces.

 

The design of apartments is and remains the most important task for architects. People live in the apartments architects plan and build. People do not have to visit a poorly designed museum, but they do have to live in terribly designed apartments. Housing design forces designers to confront the everyday questions of life. How does one enter their apartment? How does one cook? Where should the table be placed? How do occupants move around the rooms? Which dimensions allow the utmost flexibility? These are just a few of the questions that concern every architect. 

 

We have a great responsibility toward the future residents of the buildings we design. At the same time, designing apartments always reflects our own life experience. Everyone grows up in an apartment or a house. The parental home shapes us. We are part of a centuries-old history of housing, which in turn is part of our housing culture. Therefore, the design of the apartment itself was another key aspect of the task explored by students.