Description

Seijo Town Houses, Kazuyo Sejima, 2007, second floor, scale 1:500

Living Privately

The home is a spatial immune system; it is an area of “well-being against
invaders and conveyors of sickness,”[1] writes Peter Sloterdijk. In his “Sphären” (Spheres) trilogy, Sloterdijk
lays out an antithesis between immunity and community, of insularity and
participation in the communal work of the world. Sloterdijk describes in elusive
words the contemporary understanding of the private realm: in the private, one
is entirely by oneself. People can come to rest as individuals there. The home
is modern man’s “defensive machine.” Dwelling requires inattentiveness and
normality. Immunity means: exemption from communal work.

From Hannah Arendt we learn that until the modern era the public sphere was the
one in which human beings could develop, liberate one self from the constraints
of everyday life, and participate in the world. For her, that was where they
became “fully human.”[2] In the context of self-reflexive modernism and postmodernism, by contrast,
only in private did they become “themselves.” Self, self-creation, and
self-development are now equated with the private. Seeing the sphere of
self-creation in the private, whereas until the recent past it was equated with
assets and being active in the public sphere, is something I regard as a
paradigm shift.

The public sphere is now the place where individuals have to prove themselves,
constantly adapt, and take on new roles, to be on top of things and be managers
of their lives. The private sphere, by contrast, is an area to be protected from
the state, the polity, and their impositions. That is what Beate Rössler argues,
for example: “In liberal societies, privacy has the function of permitting and
protecting an autonomous life.”[3] Access to the private sphere is controlled by the individual. It offers
protection against unwanted admission by others, against alien knowledge and
alien people, actions, spaces, decisions, and ways of behaving and living.
Rössler also sees the boundaries between these two spheres as fluid, with the
historical dimension playing a smaller role than the point of view and the
specific interest that is responsible for drawing the boundary. The boundaries
between the public and private realms depend, in her view, on the situation and
are subject to discussion. But her argument is shaped by a political interest in
that she asks: Why is the private valuable? Her answer: Because it is associated
with the desire for autonomy. These are powerful concepts associated with the
private and with dwelling: immunity, autonomy, self-creation. The home is
supposed to offer a spatial sphere for all these demands. It has to be the
perfect protective space and at the same time a space for development.

This great esteem for the private has enormous consequences for the production of
the city. Present-day “urban” consumers demand individual apartments,
developments separated according to milieu, and cultural surroundings of
distinctive design. The private sphere distinguishes itself spatially. It is not
just about the dwelling in the narrower sense, which begins behind the front
door. The entire building is perceived as an extension of the self; the
immediate surroundings should be free of any disturbances; moreover, the
construction should reinforce the identity of the residents. The real estate
market distinguishes between existing milieus, categorizing hypothetical
individual characters and serving them in targeted ways. The process of
speculative appropriation was interrupted, but not permanently ended, by the
last economic crisis, in which the real estate bubble in parts of the world
burst. Because the genuine site of the private – the home – is placed above
everything, it is ennobled with the attributes of special places. It should be
by the sea, which led to extensive urbanization of the Mediterranean coasts. It
should be in the countryside, which caused sprawl around large cities. And if it
should be in the city, because of the variety of culture and infrastructure
offered there, then by all means undisturbed by neighbors, traffic, or the
noises and influences of others.

The site of autonomy and immunity is spilling over into the public sphere. People
only want to be visited at home when they have invited guests. Otherwise no
influences should find their way in – only the sun is allowed to shine in. This
is part of the promise of autonomy according to which individuals can determine
access to their private sphere. That also means control over information,
disturbances, and inconveniences but not just over other people.

The evolution has been contradictory: on the one hand, the home has become a
place of social positioning; on the other, the area protected from the demands
of such positioning. People go out with the goal of maintaining social contacts
in controlled doses. The social private space has become a territory to be
defended, whose stability is enforced with every power. Access is controlled;
homogeneity is produced. Nearly forty years ago Richard Sennett labeled this the
“tyranny of intimacy.”

Public Community

Urbanity means the ability to step out of one’s private area of retreat into the
world – into a sphere of otherness that is restrained by tolerance to the point
of being blasé. For example, Georg Simmel was already noting in 1903: “This
reserve with its overtone of hidden aversion appears in turn as the form or the
cloak of a more general mental phenomenon of the metropolis: it grants to the
individual a kind and an amount of personal freedom which has no analogy
whatsoever under other conditions.”[4]

Urbanity enables one to be other, to be different, to leave established roles –
at the price of playing the role of Simmel’s “metropolitan man.” Other people
are not allowed to come close. Urban behavioral patterns permit physical
closeness because at the same time it is guaranteed that distance from the
person will be preserved. This coolness in proximity makes it possible to be
tolerant and to put up with otherness. That is the classic definition of
urbanity in urban sociology since Simmel. In this view, freedom is a guarantee
of the public sphere. The community of the urban frees individuals of close ties
and leaves them alone.

This should not be confused with political indifference toward the individual.
The city regarded as an actor is called “Kommune” (commune / community) in
German. Its central task is collaborative work, seeing to solidarity in a local
society. Everyday politics on the communal level consists of achieving this
balance of freedom and solidarity in the public sphere.

The modernist city in Europe put into practice a principle of solidarity by
creating living conditions of equal quality – that is, by stabilizing the
private sphere. The lack of urbanity of such a city was passionately lamented.
But we should not underestimate its contribution to solidarity in the area of
housing. For faced with the political explosiveness of social inequality in the
growing cities of the world, this continues to be one political and social task
of urbanism. It may be that public spaces per se do not produce urbanity but
rather are only successful when they can be used by large sections of urban
society. A certain basic consensus based on political and social trust needs to
be guaranteed; otherwise it will only be possible to leave one’s house in a car,
in a mobile private security cell, as is true in many cities in the world. One
of the conditions is insuring a dignified private life in general by providing
areas for private retreat. Only that will provide individuals with the strength
and willingness to encounter others in urban space. Urbanity is a quality of the
urban, made possible or impeded by politics. Urban planning is one aspect of
such politics: the maintenance of public spaces and the quality of residential
architecture. As if in a magnifying glass, we see there the relationship of city
and individual, or public and private, of solidarity and self-creation.

Today we emphasize the public sphere as not just a site of tolerance in keeping
with the classic motif of urbanism but also as a site of solidarity.
Consequently, the definition of urbanity changes as well, since the political
aspect of social solidarity is given increasing weight.[5]

Dwelling and City

Residential architecture is a big theme in contemporary urban planning. Vacancy
rates in housing represent a challenge in shrinking cities. And new construction
of office buildings has almost ceased even in those European metropolises that
are growing; real estate developers are finding a market in residential
buildings. Even central locations that just a few years ago belonged entirely to
the working world are pouring into the housing market. Munich would have to
build seven thousand apartments a year to accommodate its population increase;
the housing market is correspondingly tight. An increase in single households is
also leading to continued growth in the need for living space. Combined with a
certain loss of older buildings, this has led to high demand on the housing
market. Whether on the outskirts of town, in the center, or in the urban region,
every site has potential with which one can work. Today, residential
architecture makes cities.

The assessment of the public and private spheres described at the beginning of
the essay is also resulting in new forms for residential buildings to position,
isolate, or integrate themselves within the city. Do they contribute something
to the city? Do they offer surplus value to the community? Do they recede into
the background and become “urban fabric” in the best sense? Or do they isolate
themselves in gated communities, in which the solidarity (community) of the
public sphere is completely underdeveloped, as is happening in many cities in
the world?

Moreover, new forms of dwelling and the production of living space are arising.
Private homes in which individuals shut themselves off and urban space
disappears behind soundproof walls and is only sought out for events are not
what constitutes a city. Between those two poles there is a lot that calls for
architecture to shape it. That is the place for architectural concepts that make
use of public space and at the same time satisfy contemporary demands for
housing. New forms of living together and of building homes are emerging.
Communal projects are enjoying a heyday. Cooperative building associations are
replacing anonymous investors. Different kinds of community are filling the gap
between the isolated individual and the anonymity of the city. New themes of
social solidarity and new forms for organizing social communities are
increasingly playing a role in residential architecture. Egocentric
self-fulfillment in the private sphere is clearly inadequate or even impossible
for many.

Normality and Experiment

Dwelling is fundamentally conservative. Very few people see their house and
living environment as a place for experimentation. On the contrary, it should be
familiar, offer a home, stabilize daily life. From this basic thesis is derived
the demand for the quotidian. When does architecture offer this quotidian? Can
we assess the projects in this book by that criterion? “Quotidian” does not mean
“banal” here but rather suitability to the everyday in the best sense:
unexcited, practical, surviving the latest fashion. On the other hand, it can
certainly be a little stately or something special, so that one’s own home is
recognizable amid the anonymous mass of the city.

But at the same time we find that residential architecture is currently subject
to experiments, and it needs them as well. Exploring in new ways, both socially
and spatially, the relationship between the public and private spheres is one of
these fields for experimentation, and it is also one focus of this book.
Personally, I believe that a traditional European townhouse – with its facade
facing and contributing to the public space and its rear access to a private
courtyard, which does not concern nonresidents – achieves this balance
splendidly and remains valid. Dwelling is conservative, and hence the home and
the apartment building are as well.

But when society changes, what is normality then? In a city like Munich or
Zurich, it is certainly no longer the small family. When housing cooperatives in
Zurich energetically restore buildings dating from the 1920s to 1950s, it often
leads to new construction because the floor plans are outdated. The floor plan
of an apartment for a small family in the modernist era has become outmoded. By
contrast, apartments from the late nineteenth century, whose spacious floor
plans are neutral with regard to use, continue to be suitable. They are an
example of the architectural capacity we have described with the dual gifts of
openness and succinctness, contingency and substance.[6] Openness means suitability for different ends; succinctness means
articulated spaces, dense atmosphere, aesthetic complexity, architectural
repertoire. The projects in this book should be measured by those qualities,
although the focus in this chapter is not on the floor plans and spatial
qualities of the interior of the house but only their ability to make a
contribution to everyday life in the city.

Modernist Urban Planning

Modernist urban planning has been much criticized and rightly made responsible
for the decline of urban culture. The dissolution of the dense fabric of the
city, inadequate public spaces, and buildings as isolated volumes in a landscape
that was all too often merely a green offset combined with inadequacies of
social space to form an explosive mixture. The demolition from 1972 onward of
the Pruitt-Igoe high-rise housing project in St. Louis, Missouri, built between
1950 and 1954, was proclaimed by Charles Jencks to mark the death of modernism,
and for him it was a sign of its failure.

In the meanwhile, we can differentiate better and distinguish qualities. Le
Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation in Marseilles; the Barbican Centre in London by
Chamberlin, Powell and Bon; the Superquadras in Brasilia – rather than damning
modernism in a sweeping way, it makes more sense to consider the architectural
quality of the specific project.

For example, the Hansaviertel in Berlin was rebuilt by the best architects of the
time as part of Internationale Bauausstellung (International architecture
exhibition), or Interbau, in 1957. On the one hand, it is prototypical in its
urban planning layout, a cityscape par excellence; on the other hand, it offers
outstanding residential buildings with exceptional floor plans that are still
exemplary. But apart from the beautiful buildings and the good floor plans, what
do we think of its urban planning concept today? The next Interbau in Berlin in
the 1980s established the opposite course with its policy of critical
reconstruction. At the time there were still architects living in the
Hansaviertel, but no one could know it because it was too embarrassing for them.
For a long time the Hansaviertel was either celebrated or reviled completely as
a propaganda project for a certain urban planning ideology.

It is, however, no typical development that would have been dependent on
maintenance and public events. Its site in West Berlin, near the Zoo train
station, with excellent access to public transportation and embedded in an
extension of Tiergarten park, offers something like what Kurt Tucholsky had
earlier described as the ideal form for all housing: Friedrichstrasse at one’s
front door and the Baltic Sea out back. Although they were originally designed
with great care, the quality of the open spaces and the maintenance of the park
leave something to be desired today. After fifty years the trees have at least
grown to stately proportions and offer the soothing atmosphere of a sparse
forest. That is extraordinarily important, especially for a “cityscape” project,
since most projects of the sort reveal tragic shortcomings in this regard. For
the fiftieth anniversary in 2007, the buildings were lavishly renovated. It is
once again chic to live there; an urban clientele has settled in.

Is it fair to say that the Hansaviertel profited from the city and its location
in the middle of Berlin while itself offering little to the city? No streets of
the sort Jane Jacobs called for, no nice small stores, no lively public plazas.
The composition of the buildings from an urban planning perspective was
criticized from the outset; it had really emerged in the run-up to Interbau
rather than having been a consistent design. Based on a concept by Gerhard Jobst
and Willy Kreuer that had won the competition in 1953, the positioning of the
individual buildings was increasingly made to serve the necessities of an
exhibition. However, the basic concept of Interbau – living in a green space
within a large city – was retained and can still be experienced today. In the
meanwhile it is a calm, elevated residential neighborhood in an ideal location,
punctuated with a few public facilities. The Hansaviertel has become quotidian
in the best sense. What in the 1950s was extravagantly and radically planned,[7] ruthlessly sweeping away what was then very recent history, has now
acquired the patina of its own history.

Le Corbusier’s Unité in
Marseille was completed in 1952, just a few years earlier. The urban planning
concept on which it was based was promoted as a “vertical garden-city.”[8] The individual gardens are stacked two-story loggias in front of the
apartments. One of these Unités was built in Berlin for Interbau as well –
albeit not in the Hansaviertel but rather on Heerstrasse, near the Olympic
stadium, far out in the western part of the city. Although Le Corbusier
distanced himself from this project, because the German building codes were
detrimental to his concept, the apartments in both these Unités are sought-after
today, because they convey a taste of the history of modernism. Even today, the
Unité in Berlin is still found in surroundings that suit its concept: scenic in
character and with large distances to the nearest buildings. The far more
beautiful building in Marseilles, by contrast, has since had a banal suburb grow
up around it. Le Corbusier’s idea was a solitary building, floating like a great
ship alongside others in a green landscape. This concept worked in Berlin, both
for the Unité and in the Hansaviertel, with the large buildings by Walter
Gropius, Pierre Vago, Fritz Janecke and Sten Samuelson, Oscar Niemeyer, Egon
Eiermann, and Alvar Aalto.  However, these houses are no longer associated with
an ideological manifesto of urbanism, on which those who live there must take a
stand. They are just buildings in the city that are comfortable, calm, and
located amid greenery.

Le Corbusier had long since turned against the garden city, which in his view was
flowed disastrously horizontally and destroyed cities. In 1935 he polemicized
against it during a visit to the United States: “They are garden cities, a
creation of the late nineteenth century, approved, favored, sanctified by
capitalism. Garden cities are the floodgates of the great torrent of accumulated
rancors. (…) The egoistic and biased social laws have had their life prolonged
as a result. At the end of the rainbow of disjointed garden cities there is a
disappointed dream.”[9] Would he have included in his criticism the projects by Ernst May in
Frankfurt am Main or by Bruno Taut in Berlin, which in the brief era of the
Weimar Republic provided an astonishing number of quality apartments for
everyone?

For example, Bruno Taut’s Hufeisensiedlung (Horseshoe development) in Berlin –
built from 1925 to 1933 under Martin Wagner, chief city planner from 1925 to
1933, as part of an ambitious program of residential architecture – has been a
UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2008, along with five other modernist housing
developments in Berlin. Taut’s development was no garden city in Ebenezer
Howard’s sense, not a full-fledged city but just a development with many
gardens. The individuality of the homes, most of which are row houses, was
combined with recognizable large-scale forms and spatially framed streets. The
“horseshoe” of the Hufeisensiedlung surrounds an interior green space that is
larger than a soccer field. For decades its form served as the logo for the
owners, GEHAG (Gemeinnützige Heimstätten AG). The development includes 551
homes, some very small, and for several years now there has been a project
ongoing to renovate them in keeping with principles of historical conservation.
It is served by two subway stations. At the time it was built it was located on
the outskirts of the city but it has since become embedded in the soft-focus
image of a lightly developed Berlin, amid a patchwork of industrial zones,
community gardens, and other developments from the postwar period. The
Hufeisensiedlung offers its residents and the city a happy balance between the
quotidian, Berlin banality, and symbolism, between the special and the
outstanding.

Michiel Brinkman’s Spangen residential complex in Rotterdam opened up a very
different chapter of modernist communal residential architecture: the first
great wave of public housing, a response to the catastrophic living conditions
in that industrial city, which had grown very rapidly. Large blocks form a city
within the city, formulating its own recognizable community, an alternative
model to the houses built by speculators in the late nineteenth century. The
example of the Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna is famous internationally, but projects
by the architect and chief city planner Fritz Schumacher in Hamburg and by the
Amsterdam school of successors to Hendrik Petrus Berlage in Amsterdam also made
history. The unique quality of Brinkman’s project, which we are assessing here
not for its role in the history of architecture but as a building block for the
contemporary city, is the interior access and circulation, which reinforces
community. On the outside there are main entrances and corridors: the dark,
closed form of a block. Inside there are many access routes to the apartments;
built of brick covered with whitewash, it is a different world. Many of the
access routes are locked. If it were built today, the large block would be
criticized as a “gated community.” But that criticism is reserved for the
housing developments of the wealthy, and that is clearly not the clientele
here.

The discussions of a paradigm shift in the evaluation of the public and private
spheres could be studied with this project as an example. Do today’s residents
see themselves as a community? Do they perceive the community as an offer or an
obligation? Where is their street? Is there enough privacy? Did the residents
select the development deliberately as their first choice or for pragmatic
(e.g., economic) reasons? Do the residents identify with their building? Do they
find it beautiful?

The Block and the City

The “postmodernists” believed they had an answer to all these questions. The city
block in the traditional sense was rehabilitated. In many places there was an
effort to take up again where early modernism or the late nineteenth century had
left off. The aforementioned Internationale Bauausstellung in Berlin in 1987
held up the banner of the city block: the critical reconstruction in the Berlin
neighborhood of Friedrichstadt with the aid of the block.

The Brahmshof in Zurich by
Kuhn Fischer und Partner from 1988 – i.e., from the same period – is at first
glance very closely related to the example in Rotterdam discussed above. An
identifiable large block houses a community of renters. The interior is accessed
via galleries; the inner courtyard is thus reinforced and the effect of
community emphasized. It was backed by the Evangelischer Frauenbund (Protestant
women’s league) of Zurich; every renter was automatically made a member of the
residents’ association. There is an abundance of offerings for the community:
guestrooms; roof terraces and a garden; community, gymnastics, craft, and
seminar rooms; specifically fostered apartment sharing, and so on. The courtyard
benefits from the atmospheric effect of a very large tree; the galleries are
covered with vines; and, on the exterior side facing the city, front yards
shield the apartments from public space. The severity of the Rotterdam model is
alleviated by plants on all sides. A public terrace in the entrance to the
courtyard forms the transition to the street – the project’s contribution to the
city. The Brahmshof is located in the western part of the city, near the
Letzigrund stadium, and just two streets from busy Badenerstrasse, making it
absolutely part of an urban environment. Nevertheless, it manages to withdraw
from that environment and produce its own little world. In Rotterdam the block
is located directly on the streets that encircle it. It forms an urban space,
but it clearly has problems offering the privacy desired for a home to those
located on the ground floor. The Brahmshof in Zurich avoids this conflict by
retreating. Thanks to its microclimate, even the exterior of the block can be
used as private outdoor space for the apartments. But that does not produce
urban space. The project concentrates on its own little neighborhood and
achieves diversity by means of a wide variety of housing offerings within the
site.

The Lootsbuurt on Jacob van
Lennepstraat in Amsterdam by ANA Architecten from 2008 also treats the city
block with a distinct inside and outside. In Amsterdam Oud-West the architects
were confronted with narrow, contained streets and blocks; the project began
unassumingly, simply replacing a few dilapidated buildings. The facade facing
the street is clinker brick, as is typical for the quarter. A uniformly serene
vertical window format underscores the homogenous impression. On the ground
floor many doors provide direct access to the apartments – that too is typical
of the neighborhood. Only a large glass lobby with twenty-four mailboxes
indicates that still more living space is found inside. It is only visible from
the back of the building, and its very lively facade responds completely
differently to the different apartment layouts. Here the apartments on the upper
floors are also accessed via galleries, very much like they are in Brinkman’s
design, because on the upper floors it is possible to orient the private side of
the apartments toward the street. The galleries are enhanced by a terrace open
to all residents and by extensions, and from them the inner courtyard can be
reached by descending long flights of stairs. The ground-floor apartments have
terraces directly in front of them; and the path into the interior of the block
is a colorful one. Here the exterior is made anonymous (as if it were a
respectable business suit), while the interior is individualized (as if it were
a colorful bathrobe). In fact, however, the interior need not concern anyone, as
it belongs solely to the residents, who have to get along with one another in a
relatively dense situation. It is a way of creating a neighborhood in the city,
and that is something that should be assessed against the backdrop of
differences in urban culture, especially in the case of the Dutch projects.

These three projects show how it is possible under various circumstances to
invert, turn, or fold the basic disposition of a city block – on the outside,
the street and public space; on the inside, the private side, removed from view.
Brinkman’s project has become famous: there are reports of lively comings and
goings on the gallery in the early days, with the milkman making deliveries and
children playing. It has become part of the collective repertoire of architects
and the model for many subsequent projects, probably including the two discussed
here.

De Landtong in Rotterdam by
Frits van Dongen (de Architecten Cie) is, by contrast, accessed from outside in
the traditional way. Each of the two large blocks alternates between seeming
like a block and seeming like a very large building; even so, together they
accommodate more than six hundred units. A wide variety of apartment types,
attractive roof terraces, businesses on the ground floor, and row houses
integrated into the south side with views over the harbor all combine into a
large-scale form. Here too there is a mélange of the everyday and the
experimental. Two of the inner courtyards house outdoor playing fields for the
integrated sports club. Tennis courts and housing in close proximity? That would
be legally impossible in Germany, an astonishing experiment in mixed-use
development. In that respect, this too is a block turned inside out, even though
the front doors are located very conventionally on the street side, since
beginning with the second floor the apartments are appealingly oriented toward
the water (the Maas River and two docks). The ground floor is in part urban and
public and houses the spacious entrances to the units. Kop van Zuid is an
extension of Rotterdam’s center and has a big-city feel. The enormous volume of
this complex evokes associations of warehouses on the harbor. Here again the
location within the city was a crucial parameter of the design.

Donnybrook Quarter in London
by Peter Barber seems by contrast out of place in its surroundings. That is
astonishing since both the East End generally and the immediate surroundings
feature a hodgepodge of types, styles, and urban planning approaches. How could
anything ever seem out of place there? Nevertheless, there is a connection
between all these disparate buildings in the quarter: the material. A bright,
yellowish brick dominates. Whether it is row houses in long lines, groups of
multifamily homes, or twenty-story tower blocks, all of them make use of the
same canon of materials, animated by white windows, cornices, and smaller
surfaces of bright plaster. This lively picture of materials stands up to the
interruptions and inconsistencies of daily life; everything is graciously
integrated. Donnybrook Quarter, by contrast, stands out with a homogeneous,
almost abstract overall sculpture in Mediterranean white. In an aerial
photograph it looks like a model has been inserted. It is sensitive to the
elements and decorations that residents bring with their daily lives. The small
interior street that provides access to the complex from inside is public, yet
it forms a zone in front of the entrances that has a transitional effect. But
this transition is lacking on the sides that face two streets, Parnell Road and
Old Ford Road. Fences added subsequently were intended to prevent passersby from
looking into bedrooms. Front steps, small front yards, threshold zones –
everything that the traditional row houses of this neighborhood offer – were
neglected here. Interestingly, however, it retained the distinctive spatial
articulation of interstices in the interior of the small layout. The open space
between the buildings is given equal importance, resulting in the precision of a
figure-ground relationship that updates a time-honored quality of urban planning
design.

The permeability and interior access of city blocks is an important theme for the
constant transformation of cities. Entire blocks have to be renovated for any
number of reasons; higher density is often an economic necessity these days.
More people will not so easily fit in Europe’s cities. If the infrastructure
capacity is not going to be strained, it will be necessary to produce housing to
meet the constant rise in floor space per resident, a statistic that continues
to grow. Converting old infrastructure is on the agenda for a variety of
reasons, although only parts of the building fabric may be preserved. Because
the sizes of city blocks are fixed, increasing density within old street grids
often means building within the blocks. This in turn means providing access to
the interior. In contrast to the projects discussed earlier, it does not simply
express the need for social community. The Pflegi Areal in Zurich by Gigon / Guyer
represents one such example. Retaining the old garden for patients on the
southwest side of the block necessitated access via an inner courtyard that runs
through the entire grounds. Another courtyard serves primarily to provide access
to the garage; all three open spaces structure the grounds in a way that
balances beautifully with the large volumes of the buildings. A powerful yet
subtle palette is also crucial to its unmistakably individual style. Vertical
caesuras break up the long rows and thus integrate them into the structure of
the surrounding single buildings.

Building a City

It is one thing to fit in well with the existing city. It is quite another task,
and a special challenge to residential architecture, to give it surplus value,
compensate for deficits, or even build the city anew. Rapp + Rapp were
confronted with this task when they built the Ypenburg Centrum near The Hague.  Generating a
functioning and recognizable center without historical texture primarily by
means of new residential architecture – is that even possible? It seems to have
worked thanks to three architectural tricks: First, the blocks were reduced to
the size of large houses, resulting in a network of little streets and lanes,
rather than long street facades. Second, the slightly asymmetrical layout of the
buildings results in extensions into and perspective effects in the urban
interstices. Third, a tower on each small block provides a striking silhouette,
which has become ex nihilo a landmark for this city. The center’s buildings thus
take on considerable size, recalling early industrial buildings such as tobacco
factories, cotton mills, and breweries. Without being historicizing, they
provide a certain solidity and rationality and evoke associations of bygone
worlds of labor. It could be seen as a substitute for the lack of historical
memory. The center also includes 15,000 square meters of commercial and public
facilities on the ground floors. That is not a lot, but it would solve one
problem: currently apartments are planned on the ground floor only where the
situation is suitable for such use. On the upper floor, by the way, access is
via galleries on the inside – Brinkman’s influence is evident here too.

Burkard Meyer also builds a city with his Falken residential and commercial building  on
the outskirts of the old town of Baden, Switzerland. Its size and character
alternate between building and city block. The individual apartments on the top
floor are oriented toward the courtyard. From the outside the building looks
self-confident and uniform; it is scarcely possible to distinguish between
commercial and residential floors. Consequently it is able to assert itself in a
difficult and busy location.

Creating a new center – the
centrum.odorf – was also the task for Frötscher Lichtenwagner; it was
intended to supplement the former Olympic Village in Innsbruck. Such a small
neighborhood center would scarcely be noticed for lack of mass amid the large
residential buildings that dominate the area. So here too residential
architecture helps to guarantee the significance of the project. The new
high-rise fits in naturally with the structure of development: two Olympic
villages from 1964 and 1976, which together seem to represent modernist urban
planning with no apparent interruption. A residential tower and a meandering
slab join with the public facilities on the ground floor to form a large
architectural sculpture. It does not discredit the rest of the neighborhood but
rather works, as it were, with an idiom related to the large, isolated buildings
nearby. Nevertheless, this new solitary building makes room amid other solitary
buildings for a plaza that could mark a center.

The projects already described and the Leibnizkolonnaden by Hans Kollhoff and Helga
Timmermann in Berlin are distinguished by their contribution to the public space
of the city. Residential architecture is instrumentalized, in a positive sense,
to build a city. The projects presented here achieve what should be expected
when building apartments in general: public space is organized and designed
along with it. Every building casts its shadow on public space. In these
projects, however, the streets, plazas, and spaces in between are equally
important elements in the design. Balancing figure and ground is an instrument
that can be employed to benefit public space. In Berlin this resulted in a new
urban plaza. It crossed the deep block between Leibnizstrasse and Wielandstrasse
that in the late nineteenth century housed the wings and rear houses. Now two
prestigious townhouses cross its entire length and frame the plaza, which is
marked by a pair of two-story colonnades more than a hundred meters long. Its
location near Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm ensures there will be restaurants and
stores. They are inner-city commercial buildings whose ground floors are open to
public use and whose upper stories offer apartments. Here the precarious balance
between public space and private dwelling is weighted heavily in favor of a
contribution to the public side.

City or Housing Development

Many of the apartment buildings in Zurich are managed and constantly renovated by
housing cooperatives. This does not necessarily mean that the focus is on new
social models of cohabitation. For more than a century, housing cooperatives
have been an important agent in the field of subsidized housing in Zurich, as
the apartments are rented at cost. Roughly twenty percent of the housing market
in an extremely expensive city is subsidized this way. The tradition of these
apartments, which were often combined into small developments of just a few
houses on a common green space, is still carried on in the construction of
multistory apartment buildings, usually on the edge of central Zurich. The
proximity to the hills that surround the city is palpable; the green space is
designed as a landscape motif with a visual connection to this landscape beyond
the city. This is also true of the development selected for this book, the Hagenbuchrain in Zurich by
Bünzli & Courvoisier.  It took into account the constantly changing needs of
a middle-class clientele, in that the planned renovation led to a rebuilding of
the complex. The apartments are all organized similarly but vary in size and
hence price. All employ high-quality materials and fixtures. The individual
buildings are of a size that could be read as a villa if it were on the slopes
around Zurich. At the same time their repetition in a group shifts the
impression in the direction of a development. Each building is accessed
separately from the street: single-family home. No individual use of a garden:
development. Thus the impression goes back and forth; people from Zurich
presumably know how to interpret that.

The Cours Nemausus in Nîmes by
Jean Nouvel is an example from France that shows a certain affinity: subsidized
housing, suburb, dominant open space, and no other uses integrated into it. Two
long wings span a square but it is not public as in Berlin or generally
accessible as in Zurich but rather fenced off, which was not the intention of
the project. Years ago visitors could still walk around the site, but now the
buildings and square are surrounded by fences. The buildings in particular have
lost their original character as a result; they once floated like zeppelins
above the sunken parking places, where the cars were beneath the line of sight
and yet cleverly accommodated outdoors. Was it the many architectural tourists
annoying the residents? Are the surroundings so unsuitable socially for such an
open concept? The project seems to have failed with regard to the aspect under
discussion: it later had to isolate itself from its environment with a makeshift
measure. A similar problem can be seen with the Doonybrook Quarter in London,
which was also located in a poor suburb. The transitions between the private and
the public should have been designed more carefully. In Zurich’s well-to-do
middle-class culture, there is both a different tradition for how to approach
common open spaces and less poverty. This aspect not only concerns the
organization of the ground floor but the entire disposition with regard to urban
planning. I am familiar with both projects from the time when they were new, and
the residents expressed precisely this criticism of a lack of privacy. For this
essay I merely needed to use Google Street View to look at the site and refresh
my memory but also to see the changes – such as the makeshift efforts to try to
articulate the private sphere more clearly.

In Japanese residential architecture there is a tendency to reexamine the point
of intersection between the public and the private in terms of an explicit
culture of in-between spaces. One extreme example is the Moriyama House in Tokyo by Ryue Nishizawa, which
was presented at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2010 for precisely this
reason. The entire house with its separate rooms is dissected into individual
volumes and distributed around the lot; the interstices become part of the
spatial arrangement. The curator Koh Kitayama connected this with the statement
that a new type of city would result from the tiniest spatial unit of housing.
“Half a century after the Metabolist model, this exhibition will display Japan’s
potential to once again be an ideological leader in world architecture and the
city.”¹⁰ Kazuyo Sejima, Ryue Nishizawa’s partner at SANAA,
dissected her Seijo Town
Houses in Tokyo in a related way. The housing units surround exterior
spaces, which are like the joints between different units. The parts form a
whole and at the same time break down again into their smallest units. The
spaces in between are explicitly architecturally shaped spaces, a conscious
transformation of offset gaps, which are growing ever smaller in a city of
constantly increasing population density. As social spaces, they are assigned to
the private sphere but without closing themselves off to the outside. Hence they
are comparable to the semipublic spaces of European housing developments. In
contrast to them, however, the fundamentally higher density causes a change from
diffuse landscape space to precisely formed exterior spaces assigned to housing.
This should be seen against the backdrop of a Japanese culture of architectural
interstices such as ma and engawa. The spaces in between transform this dense
apartment block into a compact structure of townhouses of great formal
simplicity, elegance, and succinctness. They form a small development in a
well-to-do part of a city and hence can scarcely be compared to the projects in
London and Nîmes. Nevertheless, their enthusiastic reception in certain circles
within the profession raises the question how much this approach can be applied
to Europe, to other cultural surroundings. For that reason alone, it is
regrettable that the planned Werkbund development in Munich by Sakamoto fell
through, as it would have taken a similarly open approach to the spaces between
the buildings. It would have been the kind of experiment from which many shy
away these days.

Architecture of the City

“Openness” and “succinctness” were the two keywords I wanted to use in discussing
several of the projects included in this volume in relation to the changing
needs of housing. Can succinctness be combined with the quotidian and normality?
How can the everyday quality of living, of banal quotidian space, be combined
with a more strongly ritual public space? How does the project react to the
specific urban and urban planning situation? How do experiments in residential
architecture work out, and under what conditions can they be successful?

Seijo Town Houses, Kazuyo Sejima, 2007, second floor, scale 1:500

How is the change in ambience between public and private space organized? Many of
these questions cannot be discussed as generalities; the answer depends on the
local cultural environment. There are different cultures of housing. That can
already be seen in neighboring countries such as Switzerland, Germany, and the
Netherlands. Whether projects in Japan to which a great deal of attention has
been paid can be transferred to Europe depends on the question of which aspects
would be used in innovative ways and under what conditions.

Because residential architecture can make a city, now more than ever, all these
questions are essential to the production of a city. Every building should
contribute something to the city, even if it is being built by private investors
for private use under private enterprise. Whether that principle succeeds is a
question of the basic idea and concept of urban planning. On that depends how
open spaces are approached, whether the street is considered as well, how inside
and outside dovetail, whether a complexity of spaces results, whether it is
possible to withdraw, whether views from outside in are desirable, how nature is
brought in, and how the surroundings are respected. All these things are themes
for the architecture of the city.

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Originally published in: Ulrike Wietzorrek, Housing+: On Thresholds, Transitions, and Transparencies, Birkhäuser, 2014.