For centuries, Zurich has thrived and grown on its position as a crossroads for history and culture, first for Europe and then for the world: especially in the last century, it has constantly remained on the maps of art, from the early 20th-century avant-gardes to the New Objectivity with its political radicalism translated into forms, always with a dialogue and attention to design that have left relevant traces in the city, such as the Museum für Gestaltung, one of the most important design museums worldwide. A ferment of artistic research that has had much to say about the design of living spaces, which is easy to notice now even in that everyday housing that has not been celebrated in the history books.
The semi-detached house on which the Swiss-Swedish firm Ductus intervened is a perfect example of this, and also adds a fourth dimension to the discourse, a depth in time: for the house is indeed from the 1930s – in its clean, rational forms, flat roof, light details such as the metal lattice balustrades – but it is also from the 1980s, when an architects couple added design layers such as a first sculptural chimney with almost neo-plastic shapes and subtle avant-garde echoes, and a white tiled floor, capable of locating the intervention in its time and place.
This is where Ductus came in, embracing the two lives of the house, telling of two eras, through materials and the presence of new solutions that are both sculptural and minimalist.
The white tiles are maintained and, where necessary, integrated to create even greater continuity between the interior spaces. The semi-reflective, satin-finished metal of the doors and fittings echoes the coarse-grained plaster of walls, and the modernist note of the low radiators in front of the windows overlooking contemporary Zurich aligned on Europaallee, with its contemporary architecture by Gigon+Guyer and Max Dudler.
The rounded corners of the openings and mirrors dialogue with the forms of the 1930s, just as another newly created fireplace revives the themes of the 1980s. Then there are the bathrooms, where all these design lines meet, where the abstraction of the tiles grows radical in a combination of geometric games, metal is very present and pink Perlino marble appears.
In its third life, the house does not seem to have reached an aesthetic terminus: the feeling is that of an increasingly layered canvas on which new chapters can still be written, the very character of the city that hosts it.