Description
Several of the initiators and first residents of the Karthago Community Household, built in 1997, originated from the squatter scene, which became especially prominent in Zurich in the 1980s, demanding more open space and affordable housing. With the Karthago Community Household, the youth movement beginnings evolved into a form of housing that greatly reduced personal space, instead creating a collective lifestyle with more exchange and social interaction.[1] The developer, founded in 1991, was the Karthago Cooperative. The organizational structure and residential project are both bottom-up in nature, having been initiated by the future residents. The Community Household form, finally realized in an unused office building converted by Anette Spiro and Stefan Gantenbein, was preceded by a long social and political process. Financing was entirely private, with the federal government providing a guarantee only for the second mortgage.[2]
The Karthago Community Household consists of four small and five large groups and a mansard apartment that currently sleeps around 46 adults and 8 children and adolescents. The average age is between 35 and 45 years. The groups 241 are divided into three-, four-, and six-room units, each clustered around a shared living and dining room with kitchenette and communal bathrooms. Only the personal rooms are not shared. Additional facilities and communal living spaces can be found outside of the groups, which share a cafeteria kitchen with dining room, a games and recreation room, a guest room, a workroom, a shared office space, and two music rooms. The cafeteria kitchen is run by employees and serves shared evening meals on weekdays. It is also possible to take the food into one’s own living group and to eat in the shared dining room there. The current resident population is quite mixed and consists of people of many ages and in many different stages of life. In addition to a core group of about eight to ten people who were intensively involved during the pioneering phase, Karthago also includes single mothers and fathers, students, and residents from abroad. Resident fluctuation levels seem fairly average. The option of switching internally from a small to a large group or vice versa is used quite often, allowing for spatial requirements to be adjusted according to the resident’s life phase.[3]
Selected project data
Exterior view with shared kitchen on the ground floor
Roof terrace for communal use
The 68 m² large events hall can be used for yoga, meetings, parties and the like
Footnotes
Stahel (2006): Wo-Wo-Wonige!, p. 68. 2
The ideological background for the pr oject was P.M.’s bolo’bolo utopia. His writings describe the autonomous lifestyle of a residential and working community, somewhat like a Community House – hold, which, through selfsufficiency and a barter system, would result in a dense network of social relationships. Although P. M. stated that a distinction must be made between the ideas of his utopia and reality, his work nevertheless influenced a variety of different residential projects and impacted discussions on collective living in Zurich. For more, see Stahel (2006): Wo-Wo-Wonige!, pp. 63, 66 f.
According to documents provided by the Karthago Cooperative.
Originally published in: Susanne Schmid, Dietmar Eberle, Margrit Hugentobler (eds.), A History of Collective Living. Forms of Shared Housing, Birkhäuser, 2019. Translation by Word Up!, LLC, edited for Building Types Online.