Between Thermal Gradient and Spatial Movement
Repetition - Walking through Neuendorf, one particular type of house attracts attention. Single-family houses built between the seventies and the eighties are repeating themselves. Their particular, recurring shape, is duplicated in the landscape. With its asymmetrical gable roof, the shape gives the house a particular character, positioning and orientating the building in the landscape in a specific way, at first glance. However, they multiply and each seems to choose a specific orientation according to criteria as numerous as there are replicas in Neuendorf. Banackerweg ein single-family house is the starting point for an exploration of this type.
Model of Collectiv Imaginary - This type proliferated across Switzerland during the period, becoming a familiar feature of the Swiss landscape. Yet, they seem to remain anonymous: they have no specific names, and do not appear in architectural literature. They can be found in fragments in advertisements, and they are commercialised in miniature, underlining their importance in the collective imagination and in the common architectural trends of the time.
Material Culture - These houses are characterised by their materiality, especially their roofs, which are covered with Eternit fiber cement slates, capping the house. At a time of shift from traditional materials to processed materials, Eternit was a symbol of technological progress and industrial innovation, representing Swiss ability to innovate in building technologies at the time.
Suburban Swiss Product - In the 1970s and 1980s, the middle class aspired to live in a single-family house while minimising its maintenance. This type reflects this transition to a consumer society focused on functionality, quality, affordability and everyday comfort. The advertising campaigns by Eternit, promoting its slates, were perfectly aligned with these needs, promising resistance to the ‘harshest’ Swiss climates, long life and simplicity of maintenance.
Fireplace and Social Representation - The house becomes a product, an efficient system for good living. Its interior is also strongly influenced by the trends of the time. The interiors are “mise en scene”. The volumes give the space a ‘high standing’ character, reflecting the desire for social representation at the time. The fireplace takes a central place in the interior space, and seems to be spatially instrumentalised for purely formal reasons. And yet, through its presence, a characteristic thermal element is at the center of the house. Protected from all external climatic influences by the most modern technologies of the time, the interior of the hermetically enclosed house is imagined around the fireplace, a traditional and central thermal element in housing for centuries, conferring a tangible and symbolic warmth on the space that contains it.
Thermal Delight - While the quest of our time is to control the environment as precisely as possible, our bodies are sensitive to micro-climatic changes, and our memories are deeply marked by these sensations. It is often spaces with distinct thermal qualities that remain imprinted in our memories, marking a connection between architecture and our bodies. Whether for thermal delight or current ecological reasons, should we not learn to live with the climate rather than trying at all costs to keep it out? As with the place given to fireplaces in this type of house, should we not put our understanding of the local climate back at the heart of our way of life, in order to rediscover the spatial habits that have been lost to technology?
Thermal Gradient in Standardised Architecture - By duplicating the house and its occupants, the fireplace, the façade, the garden and the garage, in the specific context of Banackerweg ein in Neuendorf, the new elements adapt to their environment, based on the appreciation of thermal variations and on daily and seasonal rhythms. Through reflection on porosity, boundaries between outside and inside, or material culture, this project wants to explore how integrating thermal gradients and spatial movement in a single-family house can create a dynamic, adaptive and dense living environment that responds to the microclimate, enhances thermal delight, and aligns with daily and seasonal rhythms.
