Your home is wherever you are

The curators of the Swiss pavilion at this year’s 16th Architectural biennial in Venice, which was awarded the Golden Lion prize for its installation «Svizzera 240: House Tour», present contemporary, standardised residential construction by superimposing various scalings of selected footprint sequences. Here living is programmed on defined uses and standardised components. Even if the curators explicitly point out that they are not criticising the standards in residential construction with their installation, the effect of the repeated scenes in different scales is still sobering. The standardised perceptions of the residential building industry are a long way away from opening up public spaces and therefore far removed from the issues that will characterise how we live and our lives.

Already in 1985 the two authors Philip J. Stone and Robert Luchetti described how the development of the cordless telephone would change the way we work and therefore the use of office buildings. With the spread of broadband technology, Smartphones and the introduction of the app store as a sales portal for mobile applications, the way we deal with space, infrastructure and services has actually changed fundamentally during the second half of the first decade of the new millennium. Digital services alter the use of urban structures and therefore the rhythm of our lives.

While private ownership – our own home, the house, the car – were a manifestation of our social status at the end of the 20th century, the advance of digitalisation and therefore the increased flexibility above all in urban centres has led to a shift in values. We present ourselves on social media, while physical ownership has become second rate and «sharing» is the model that corresponds to this society.

What started with «Airbnb», the renting out and renting of living space by private individuals to private individuals, has now arrived in other sectors. The Zurich company «sharoo» offers a platform for hiring cars and this is therefore in line with this trend. «The car as a status symbol is outdated, and an increasing number of people live in urban areas without their own car, but don’t want to give up the convenience of having their own car. Mobility at the press of a button is in demand», says Jana Lév, manager of strategic corporate development at sharoo. «On average vehicles remain unused for 23 out of 24 hours per day. Also because lots of people don’t need their cars for their commute to work, particularly in cities. And they can be rented out precisely during this time to private individuals, companies, cities and also residential developments.» The Smartphone and the development of applications is also a pre-condition for this form of sharing. Hirers and people who rent cars out, similar to Airbnb, can register on the platform and book the cars via the app. Jana Lév talks about «Mobility on demand».

This development can also be identified for living: To the extent that private ownership is losing importance, private living space as the location of representation is also losing its relevance. Retreating will take place, if at all, on an individualised basis. One doesn’t even need one’s own home to do this. The corresponding availability in co-working areas, sports studios, libraries or even universities is being  used to an increasing extent.

This means that the traditional divisions between living, working and leisure are becoming redundant. Living may then perhaps be a description for all our activities, if these terminological definitions are not to disappear completely. But what does this mean for our previously very mono-functional conditioned buildings and our cities?

«The idea of hybrid uses therefore plays a central role in our future projects», explains Hauser in this connection. «In Shanghai we are opening a project this year, which is a precise example of this. We are creating a small town in the building, which contains a multi-layered mix of apartments, work and also public areas in the form of cultural and leisure activities. By integrating public functions, buildings are created that are closely linked to the character of the relevant city and therefore also generate added value for the location, the neighbourhood and the inhabitants.»

It is exactly this merging of functions that has an impact on the urban space. If functions are no longer specified, multi-functional use becomes conceivable, a car park could double up as a market, the street as a shared space and consequently the urban space would become more diverse.

«Mobility and the associated infrastructure will be controlled by demand in an ideal world. More flexible work models reduce traffic and with the right mix the individual mobility options are used optimally. Free spaces occur, which can be re-used to increase the quality of life in this way», is how Jana Lév describes a possible scenario. Recently we are being asked to think actively and creatively along these lines, to dismantle the blocks in our heads and leave standards behind us, but not only in residential construction.

In his work «Figures, Doors and Passages» the architect and author Robin Evans, when analysing Villa Madama in Rome, designed by Raffael and Sangallo 1518–1528, describes its spatial availability as a varied consequence of the different room sequences without any hierarchical classification and without prescribing a possible use. If one reads the footprint of Villa Madama as an urban space, one could regard Raffael’s design as a response to the question of spatial conditioning in the 21st century. The available space is there, we have to decide how we occupy it.