Architect: Christian Kerez
Project: House with One Wall
Location: Zurich, Germany
Date: 2004-2007
Chstian Kerez seeks to create ‘projects’ by inventing rules and constraints for activities in his day to day life. In this the architect manages his expectations as the rules serve to generate unexpected, surprising outcomes simultaneously avoiding mediocrity. Kerez gave an example of one of these ‘projects’ while giving a lecture at Harvard University in 2012, as the arranging and composition of flowers, whereby the constraints may be given by the selection of flowers available at a given shop or the arrangement of flowers of certain, shapes sizes and colours.
Located in the Witikon borough in southwest Zurich this setting of rules can be seen in the reasoning behind the concept of the House with One Wall, with the argument that the base requirement in a building which is to serve as two dwellings be a dividing wall. Conventionally, this provides no interaction or expression in regards to function.
The struggle between this constraint or rule and the design process generates conceptual clarification while simultaneously reducing arbitrariness. The shape of the wall is the reverse in one flat to the other, and so this duality cannot accommodate arbitrary form. On the one side convex, on the other concave. The shape provides the structural rigidity, reducing the architecture to this one element while providing the necessary alcoves for the only enclosed spaces in the otherwise open plan, to create bathrooms. Even here, the geometry of the wall is not interrupted as the sliding door closes off the alcove.
By carefully analysing and distilling the requirements of the building to a single element, Kerez achieves a conceptual clarity, which translates to the structure, spatial organisation and contextual response.
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