Zelda Frank

Unlike the longevity Fluntern propagates with its large mansions and old trees, this neighbourhood has been inhabited for centuries by wine farmers and covered in vineyards. Only since the Kantonales Baugesetz of 1893 has Fluntern become a well-situated neighbourhood with a fast-changing ownership of property, a process in which ETH Immobilien also participated. 

This ever-intensifying speculative tendency of selling and buying is what the project aims to counter, while answering to the current housing crisis. These two aspects are addressed firstly through a land reform, where property lines of 7 plots owned by ETH Immobilien are redrawn as one plot, as a consequence of the ownership being transferred to the city of Zurich. Secondly, the project is meant as a strategy on dealing with areas of low density, merely composed of urban villas with lush gardens surrounding each buildings. Instead of keeping every garden enclosed, the merging of property through a land reform, by separating the ownership of land with the ownership of the buildings, this enables to enhance the existing parc landscape and creates a continuous fabric of outside space, open to the whole neighbourhood.

Densification is attained through the combining of these 7 plots and the transformation of the current use (one family per villa) into a communal way of living, where the private bedrooms are situated in the existing villas and the shared functions: living and cooking placed in the pavilions, added to each villa. Their spatial layout is contrasting the rather solitaire and massive architecture of the villas, and presents not only a common space, but also a permeable space towards the surrounding parc. Density is thus not created by a maximisation of buildable land, but by removing spatial divisions such as gates and fences and by the implementation of communal and public uses.