THE SPECIFIC IN THE GENERIC – A SUBVERSIVE STRATEGY? OR: HOW DO WE DESIGN HOUSING? On a societal level, one phenomenon is particularly important for housing today (or the production of housing): namely, the paradox between the emphatic individuality and the simultaneous anonymity of the residents. The reasons for this paradox are, on the one hand, the enormous increase in prosperity in Europe over the past fifty years, which has enabled nearly all individuals in society to design their lives independently. The pluralism of lifestyles inevitably leads to very different patterns of demands and individual forms of expression. There are at least two reasons for the increasing anonymity: On the one hand, the very structure of development today produces anonymity, since it is no longer possible to identify groups, profiles, or images in the atomized mass of different lifestyles. The individual is disappearing in the blurriness of the whole. Moreover, the production conditions of the market economy provoke a move toward large units, since that is the only way to optimize the relationship between costs and profit. This also favors “large” and hence institutional developers, since they are the only ones with sufficient capital. Thus the resident vanishes into the background of the developer’s often vague user profile. The reason for these vague profiles is the difficulty of reconciling individual demands.
One consequence is the above-mentioned uniformity and lack of innovation in housing, which is also a result of developers minimizing risk. The question that interests us is: What can the specific within the generic be? And how is it to be achieved? In our projects we base the design of apartments on a spatial idea and do not imagine a certain user profile. We deal with fundamental architectural themes: How large is a room? Or: How high should it be in order to be a good space. How are the rooms connected to each other? How do you move in an apartment? These questions follow not from functional or societal requirements but from spatial concepts. In my presentation I would like to present three concepts that guide us in designing housing.
Imagined Context We studied architecture at the ETH, where context is very important in design. Unfortunately, the related analyses were often limited to morphological, typological or stylistic investigations. For most tasks, however, such analyses do not go far enough today because the urban situations found are either too open or too heterogeneous for usable conclusions to be drawn for architectural intervention. The concept of an “imagined context” is the idea of an extended context for the architectural design. It goes beyond what is visible. It does not represent the reality according to which the design is developed 77