Liitjens Padmanabhan's
housing in the Ziirich
suburb of Oerlikon
reimagines Brunelleschi
in Eternit fibre-cement
board and grey-painted
timber (opposite and
previous page).lnside,
mirrored pedestals
and faux chimney
breasts conceal cheaply
boxed-in ducts and pipes
(opening page)
ccording to BOG's Global Wealth
Report 2019, one in 15 people in
Switzerland is a millionaire, the
highest concentration in the
world. The country has the highest average
wealth per adult, 91 billionaires, and exports
13 .8 billion CHF-worth of watches a year.
With some of the lowest non-resident
taxation levels in the world, you might
expect an overheated vVild West property
market, crawling with foreign investors, and
pitted with empty 'deposit-box' apartments,
to rival London or New York. Instead, since
1984, in many cantons it has been almost
impossible to purchase property if you are
a non-Swiss resident, with only 1,440
properties a year available as second homes
to non-residents in the whole of Svvitzerland,
predominantly in the ski resorts and other
tourist destinations.
Switzerland is a nation of renters: only 43
per cent of t he population are home-owners,
the lowest proportion in Europe. In Easel, a
staggering 84 per cent of people rent their
home; in Zurich it's three-quarters. The
majority of tenants rent from private
landlords and are protected by an armoury
of regulations - the envy ofrenters the world
over - and taxes on rental income are high,
in total often exceeding 50 per cent, putting
off many speculative get-rich-quick landlords.
In Zurich, nearly one in four dwellings are
owned eit her by a co-operative or a public
foundation, providing rents one-fifth below
market rates. 'Social housing', typically
understood to be owned and provided by
the state, is almost non-existent. These
non-profit housebuilders not only provide
low-cost housing, but also encourage one of
the healthiest architectural cultures in the
world, running competitions for each project
and supporting inventive housing design.
'For the past 15 years, Zurich has been at
the forefront of innovative housing',
architect Thomas Padmanabhan recognises.
In 2013, Lutjens Padmanabhan won an
invited competition to build 21 apartments
in the suburb of Oerlikon for Stiftung PWG:
a non-profit, public foundation of the city of
Ziirich which owns and manages 1,7 87
apartments and 316 commercial properties.
The foundation purchases and renovates old
buildings as well as constructing new ones
for affordable lease, including a project by
EMI Architekten completing imminently
and Peter Markli's r ed-sided mini-tower
on Hohlstrasse from 2005.
Lutjens Padmanabhan's building,
completed last year, crouches among the
pretty villas and polite supine tenements
of the meandering backstreet of
Waldmeisterweg - 'a blurry, fragmented and
undefined in-between' on the northern fringe
of the city, 'somewhere betv;reen a
Ga1·tenstadt (garden city) and a Siedlung
(housing estate)'. Above the hedgerows and
flanked by trees, the building emerges likean outsized garden shed, a giant order
of 2-metre-wide Eternit 'shingles', like
overlapped timber boards, wrapping around
its perimeter. The facades lean very lightly
against each other like a house of cards, the
edges pulling away slightly from the corners.
Like garden fences, each elevation cradles
and encloses a small pocket of greenery,
or a fragment of street or pathway. A long
strip of delicate bicycle shed carefully angled
to structure the landscape to the rear.
The architects were conscious not to
'humiliate the site', looking to the robust
villas of Lux Guy er - one of the first female
architects in Switzerland - dating from
the '20s and '30s and faced in plum-coloured
Eternit boards, and the 'bold little banal
box' ofVenturi Scott Brown's Lieb Beach
House from 1969, a hut on the shoreline
of ~ew Jersey bound in asbestos shingles.
A play of references and quotes is
whispered in hushed tones, so as not to
scare the quiet suburban neighbours. The
front facade is loosely divided by an order
of grey-painted timber batten pilasters
(easily confused for rainwater pipes which,
in true Swiss fashion, run internally), to
create simultaneously a run of 10 row houses
and a long columnar Palladian palazzo. The
architects refer to Brunelleschi's Ospedale
degli Innocenti in Florence, revelling in the
ambiguity of an elevation that is alternately
a light grey surface with darker pietra
serena elements applied onto it or a skeleton
ofpiet1·a serena with light plaster filling in
t he gaps, depending on where you stand. But
rather than smoky sandstone and plaster, in
r esidential Zurich Brunelleschi is modestly
realised in painted timber and fibre cement.
The elevation is not built from the ground:
instead a 'horizon' of grey timber ties around
t he building's waist like a belt while the
ground shifts below, a whole floor buried
at the back of t he building. Two storeys
hang below and two sit above, the r elaxed
arrangement of windows jostling like beads
on an abacus. At its base, a ramped 'buttress'
shores up the facade, lilce the protective
talus at the foot of an ancient fort - except
here it is crafted from foam-filled fibre-
cement board rather than solid stone.
And on the top floor, the four apartments -
including t he two largest four- and five-
bedroom :fiats - are treated as small boxy
pavilions perched on the roof, a far cry
from lavish penthouses.
As in most Swiss housing blocks, the
grotmd floor is dominated by a buggy
park and lavish laundry rooms which move
space-hungry clutter from individual homes.
Padmanabhan describes the roughcast
concrete bank of washing machines as both
'an altar to washing' and a buffet table for
communal parties - wishful thinking maybe
but the jazzy striped floor, large mirrors,
and pink doors do lend themselves
a faintly discotheque feel.