Anne Kockelkorn and Susanne Schindler

Zurich is a center of global finance and exemplifies the associated pressure of a financialized real estate market. At the same time, Switzerland’s largest and historically most industrialized city has a century-old tradition of non-profit housing. Since the 1990s, the city’s cooperative movement—activists, city officials, architects— has re-appropriated this form of permanently decommodified development. Today, approximately twenty percent of the city’s housing stock is cooperatively owned and permanently withdrawn from the for-profit sector. In the process, cooperatives have realized new and highly experimental architectural forms of living together that challenge the established understanding of the household and the dwelling unit. New typologies include cluster housing, or groups of micro-units assembled into a larger whole, and apartments for large households, sometimes with access to a serviced kitchen. Cooperative Conditions presents projects that reframe the dimension and role of shared spaces, whether on the interior or exterior of the buildings. Zurich’s cooperatives thus demonstrate that non-profit housing can respond to very specific housing needs whose high material and socio-spatial quality remains exempt from commodification.

Image 1 – How will we live together?
On the communal rooftop of the Kalkbreite cooperative by Müller Sigrist Architekten in Zurich, a mixed-use project completed in 2014.

Photo: Anna Derriks

Image 2 – Sneak peek of the project
MAS GTA students in conversation with Raphael Frei and Andreas Sonderegger of pool Architekten, Zurich, February 2020. 

Photo: Sanna Kattenbeck

gta Institute, Department of Architecture (D-ARCH)
Ernst Göhner Stiftung
Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia
Allgemeine Baugenossenschaft Zürich (ABZ)
Wohnbaugenossenschaften Schweiz (WBG

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