Germany

“In the last 20 years, building homes was not the issue,” in the words of Nikolaus Hirsch, one of the curators of the exhibition “Wohnungsfrage” (The Homes Question), at the start of his opening speech at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin in October.

We are now paying the price for this. Not only is there a shortage of apartments in large cities, but also that the way we wish to or have to live is changing. The spatial separation of working and living, for example, is becoming even more blurred. Moreover, we are mobile and work globally, which leads to a rising demand for second homes. Christine Hannemann, a sociologist of homes, uses the term “multilocality” for this phenomenon. Furthermore, the fundamental pattern of the classical nuclear family is dissolving more and more, and the diversity of lifestyles is increasing. Communal living is topical once again – and more than ever. Even if this is not yet very apparent in percentage terms, the yearning to live in a community as a substitute for the idea of the large family is in the ascendant. Various models for living are possible in our individualised age. Yet there exists an obvious discrepancy between wishes, needs and the actual possibilities that the market provides. Or, to put it in the words of Wilfried Kuehn, a further curator of the exhibition mentioned above: “The question of homes is not a special problem, but one that goes beyond disciplines. There is no answer to it – it can only be confronted and explicitly addressed.”

In this edition of the German Domus we present the project “Mehr als Wohnen” (More than Living), an innovative quarter for communal living in Zurich. This large-scale participative experiment, which arose from the exchange of views of all those involved, is being monitored by researchers. The users’ behaviour is being investigated and the results will be published. The collective model for living of the Dutch architects Möhn + Bouman, for its part, is devoted to a marginal social group. This residential building provides a new home for 62 persons with mental handicaps, but does not have the usual character of an institution. According to the motto “intercultural living”, a further interesting and highly urban form of communal life was created on one of the largest and most important inner-city redevelopment areas in Vienna: an ensemble of buildings designed by three different architects that opens up to the community at ground-floor level. In contrast to these forms of collective living, we present houses by Peter Märkli and Valerio Olgiati, two projects that were conceived for individual living requirements yet are far from being conventional single-family homes. Both are notable for a strong ground plan that lends a closed yet at the same time extremely open character to living there. In addition, they are a visible demonstration of the love of pure materiality.

Love of nature and the mountains, on the other hand, was what motivated the photographer Kaspar Thalmann to document the avalanche structures of the Swiss mountain village St. Antönien. A mountain in Italy, which is the conclusion of our thematic section, was also subjected to human intervention: with his installation on Monte Pizzuto, the artist Mimmo Paladino used countless shards of blue glass to close a wound caused by the construction of a water reservoir on the slope.

Domus Germany 17, January–February 2016, cover

Germany

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