Basel / Barcelona: A discussion on housing

 

Is the housing unit you have both built a model to be reproduced?

Carles Baiges Camprubí : We're very pleased that the project we've completed is not the last of its kind. Others will follow, even if it's difficult to reproduce 100% of what happened in a specific context, under specific conditions. But many other things have happened at La Borda, and we're pleased that this is the case, because if there had been just one project as an exception, it might have been considered a failure.  The aim has always been to offer something that could be reproduced and help other projects to move forward.

Can you give an example of something that has been reproduced from this project?

Carles Baiges Camprubí: The first thing that springs to mind is the question of parking spaces. La borda has expressed its firm intention not to include underground parking. To make this possible, we had to change the regulations, since underground parking is a requirement for new buildings. Thanks to what we have done at La Borda, new buildings can now refrain from having an underground car park.
The way in which communal spaces have been treated, or questions of typology are some of the solutions that have been applied in other projects.
We do these things, but we also know that other architects are interested in the borda and integrate different aspects of the project into their own. We don't see ourselves as inventors of these things. Rather, we see it as us under our latittudes.
Before we got to this point, when we discussed these typologies, or even the principle of shared spaces, we were told that it worked in the countries of northern Europe, but that it didn't suit us ‘southerners’.
So we felt that our contribution was to prove that this type of architecture was feasible and desirable in a Mediterranean context. And of course, we can also take credit for working on the regulatory framework, which is very rigid. The borda has opened up a range of possibilities that didn't exist before.

Is the Weinlager also a model to be reproduced?

 Philipp Esch : In a more general sense, good architecture always has an exemplary dimension. It is never limited to a specific case and always strives to achieve a general validity. In the case of the Weinlager, there are so many issues, social issues, sustainability issues, genius loci issues that could be taken into consideration and possibly reproduced. There are many interactions within the building, but also with the surrounding area. The Weinlager radiates outwards. And of course, there are the construction issues, the way things have been made to last, the low carbon footprint, the way 2/3 of the energy is produced on site. The project as a whole should encourage people to be less product-oriented and more process-oriented when planning residential projects.

In most cases, we have a very specific brief to fulfil, and if you have to do that with an existing structure, you realise that a lot of things are unpredictable, which leads to much more interesting flats, much more interesting interactions with the customer, all within a framework of complicity with the planners, the authorities and the customers.  This degree of complexity, characteristic of working within existing frameworks, is actually very encouraging.

Zurich is the home of a cooperative housing culture that is unique in the world in its scope. Is the Weinlager building, which is not a cooperative, inspired by this culture? In what sense? 

 Philipp Esch: Our head office is in Zurich and we are very much embedded in the culture of cooperative housing. As far as the cooperative spirit is concerned, the Weinlager is without doubt a collective housing project that enables and even encourages cooperative living. Not so much in terms of empowerment, but rather in terms of the influence of a house on its surroundings. The client was very concerned about the wider impact of the Weinlager, and this goes hand in hand with the fact that the client is also involved in the design and planning of the neighbourhood. When it comes to the organisation of the house itself, the central question we were faced with is the same one that determines co-operative living. What do I need for myself? What can I do without and how much can I share with my neighbours? 

It's not a question of doing without or living with less. This experience of sharing must be seen as a gain. Something added, like guest rooms, coworking, large basement workshops, a communal kitchen on the roof, carpooling, a laundry roof area. There's a lot of infrastructure to share, and that's in addition to the private aspects of housing.  In terms of environmental impact, the conversion of the existing three basement levels partly into car parks for the neighbourhood has a considerable impact on freeing the surrounding streets of parked cars.  It also means that all the surrounding buildings don't have to build a car park. And, of course, the most important thing is that all this already existed. We didn't dig a three-storey underground car park. The Weinlager offered this possibility, as the wine tanks were stored there.

What you describe as the effect of the building on its environment is in fact a level of cooperation that goes beyond the question of housing; the building cooperates in some way with other buildings.

 Philipp Esch: Absolutely.  And this is also something that Carlès mentioned about La Borda. The Weinlager and La Borda are not ships sailing alone in a vast sea.   The way in which these two buildings radiate out beyond their strict perimeter is at least as important as what happens inside the house.

Basel and Barcelona are very different contexts, but I have the impression that in both cases there are political struggles and a push by certain people and communities against a certain model that sees the house only as a commodity.

On the one hand, the rise of the cooperative model in Switzerland is also structural, linked to the way in which wealth is redistributed in society. In Catalonia, there is growing concern about the gentrification of the city and the impact of excessive tourism on property prices. I was wondering how, in these two cases, you see your role as an architect in the context of these tensions.

The prize was launched because we thought that housing was going to become, for all these reasons, an increasingly crucial issue in the future. I wonder if, as architects, you see yourselves in relation to these emerging tensions.

Carles Baiges Camprubí : Our role as architects is a subject we've addressed many times. We must recognize that we are just one part of a larger game, or ecosystem. There are some very good architects who unintentionally contribute to these processes of speculation and gentrification.  In a way, it's very difficult to escape these mechanisms. So we don't just need good architecture, we also need good policies to make sure that housing goes in the right direction.

However, we also believe that we can have an impact as architects.  When it comes to the final decision, you can always decide whether to take part in projects that are leaning too far in the wrong direction.  And of course, before refraining from contributing, you can also try to improve things within a problematic framework.  To make buildings a little more open to their neighbourhood, to prevent exemplary housing from turning into a gated community, good design can enact a certain degree of porosity. Everyone can have an impact on their lifestyle. So do architects.

Both projects function as models for alternative ways of producing housing. There's something about the way society is evolving in terms of housing that draws us towards these models, whether we like it or not. What I find interesting about the Weinlager is not only the fact that part of the existing structure has been reused, but also that additions have been made with an eye to how they might evolve in the future. It all adds up to the idea that even though we architects have a limited range of action, we do have an impact, and we need to be aware of that.

Philipp Esch: Looking back, I realise how lucky I am to live in a country where 2/3 of the population are tenants rather than owners.  Faced with the atomisation that is the immediate consequence of ownership, it becomes extremely complicated to be inventive.  Added to this is the fact that density is a key factor in sustainability. Collective housing can organise density, but an owner-occupied city is more likely to be a sprawling city

The building is conceived as a housing complex with added services. Is there a connection between the Swiss hotel tradition and this type of collective housing? 

Philipp Esch: No, there's a misunderstanding here. In a hotel, additional services are consumer goods. In the Weinlager, shared spaces are just features of communal living. Their success depends on how the inhabitants activate them, not on whether they can be marketed.

Does cooperative housing, and the way it places the inhabitant at the heart of the spatial design process, take away any of the architect's prerogatives?

Carles Baiges Camprubí: No, cooperatives are customers like any other.  Even if they don't choose what we think is the best solution, it's up to them to decide, they're the ones who are going to live there, it's their project. In many cases, we even leave certain parts of the building to be finished later. These are usually communal areas. A customer's needs can change. It's a good idea to accept and anticipate this in any case.

As for the layout of the units, here too it's the users who have the final say, even if we don't agree with all their choices. In certain projects, we would like to go further in terms of materials or radical typology. Here again, it's the customer who decides.  This is not a characteristic specific to cooperatives. Architects in general need to show more humility.

Cooperative housing still suffers far too much from difficulties in accessing financing. How has this been resolved in Catalonia?

Carles Baiges Camprubí : In the case of La Borda, fundraising has been quite exceptional: we've had over 300 entities or individuals lend us money.  We didn't want to go down the traditional bank financing route, and even if we had, the bankers wouldn't have lent us any money.

Things have improved since then. Today, there are ethical finance companies that lend to cooperatives. There is also a kind of public bank that lends money to cooperatives. In the meantime, we've learnt to improve subsidy-raising strategies, to make sure that people aren't excluded from a cooperative project for economic reasons.  What has complicated matters in recent years is the rise in interest rates and the 25% increase in the cost of building materials. The gain in funding is absorbed by the increase in costs. 

Philipp Esch: Given the long tradition of cooperative housing, Swiss banks lend easily to this type of project.  For a banker, cooperatives are probably the most reliable clients he can have. They generally own the land on which they build, and the cooperative is the legal owner of the assets it administers.  So all the guarantees are there. In the case of the Weinlager, this is a privately funded foundation committed to providing affordable housing.

Basel is experiencing a property boom, which is speculative in some respects, and which is also producing office towers and luxury flats. Is this overall property situation likely to detract anything from the exemplary nature of the Weinlager?

Philipp Esch: It's the same everywhere else, including Barcelona. You have speculative investments alongside more virtuous projects.  There's not necessarily a link between these two initiatives. As far as the development of skyscrapers in Basel is concerned, it has to be said that wealth in Basel was traditionally hidden.  The few very wealthy families made it their favourite sport.  This corporate architecture, which aims to dominate the city's skyline, is a recent development. That said, we shouldn't reduce collective housing to affordable housing. There is in fact a huge problem with luxury flats, as can be seen in London, where there are too many of these flats, which remain unoccupied most of the time. This situation should not lead us to target high-income flats in general. If this type of supply enables the more affluent to leave their suburbs to come and live in the city centre, it may also be a gain for the environment and sustainability in general.  Living densely in a sociologically mixed city - that's the goal, isn't it?

The wealthy have also a right to the city.

Philipp Esch: A few years ago, we completed a major development of 145 top-of-the-range flats with only 15 car parks.  It's also possible to convince wealthy people to live without a car, in the heart of the city.  And these flats are all occupied. These are no condominiums.  20 years ago, that would have been impossible.

 Barcelona is also committed to a long-term strategy to reduce the presence of cars in the city's residential areas.

 Carles Baiges Camprubí: Over the last decade, there seems to have been an attempt to get cars out of the city, especially in a city like Barcelona, where there is good public transport in almost every district.  But there's a paradox: while we have this general desire to reduce car use, building regulations stipulate that each flat must have its own car park.  At a certain point, it was as if social housing encouraged car ownership.  We ended up with new flat blocks where half the car parks were unoccupied. To get rid of cars, you need all the measures to go in the same direction. Cases like this, where an existing regulation goes against the general objective, are not that rare.

Here in Barcelona, we have increased acoustic regulations in recent years, so that La Borda could not have been built today, as it is, because it does not meet acoustic requirements.  This means that we need extra money and extra materials for acoustic insulation, and ultimately it means that we won't be able to build in wood, because wood carries a lot of sound. These are conflicting agendas. Promoting wood on the one hand and making it impossible to build with wood on the other.  What happened with the car park was something of a contradiction of this kind, and as such it was easy to convince the politicians and technical authorities, by exposing the requirement for car parks as outdated and at odds with general policy.

What are your architectural references for these projects? Is there a certain continuity with a modernist language, in Basel and Barcelona? In the case of Barcelona, there's something to be said for revisiting modernism in the way you've used shading. In both cases, the architectural quality was a determining factor for the jury. The question of methodology came next. So perhaps we could review this aspect of the two projects. What architectural features are you concentrating on? The plans, the typologies, the circulation, the voids, etc.?

Philipp Esch: I'm grateful for this question because we've talked a lot about political and economic conditions, but in an untimely way, a project is a question of beauty, and a good project is nothing other than a change in the conception of beauty.

The Weinlager is difficult to compare with previous projects, as it is our first large-scale conversion project.  At the Weinlager, what was decisive was the presence of the existing supporting structure. There wasn't much else to attract to this structure, the load-bearing structure, configured for industrial use, was its main appeal. That's why we made the pillars the protagonist of the building. The new pillars and the existing pillars.  It's a very modernist theme, the Corbusean highlighting of the load-bearing structure. We were quite orthodox in this respect, stating from the outset that the load-bearing structure should not be affected by dividing walls.

As far as the references are concerned, they are less stylistic and more linked to atmospheres and feelings. The mass of the supporting structure reminded us of Egyptian temples. And we tried to counterbalance them by using wooden pillars. We tried to introduce something less eternal and more ephemeral from a Japanese perspective. Shinohara helped us find a new load-bearing structure that we felt was contemporary and durable, with a physical presence similar to that of the existing pillars. This is the way we look at references, rather than quoting 50s industrial architecture.

Carles Baiges Camprubí: There are a lot of references, some coming from traditional solutions, such as the courtyard, which comes from central and southern Spain and is called corrala, and involves small houses grouped around a central courtyard.  Or, as you mentioned, the use of wooden blinds.  This is a sustainable, low-tech construction method.  We have a few more recent references, in Switzerland, Belgium and France. The 70s in the Netherlands with Aldo van Eyck, or Hertzberger. Over and above the stylistic borrowings, we have tried to take from Hertzberger the way in which the communal spaces relate to each other visually and spatially.

Is there a kind of trap in doing a highlighted, exemplary project, forcing you to make the next project as good as the one that won the award?

Philipp Esch: It's not a trap. We're very grateful for the award. Collective housing forms the background to the city and deserves to be brought to the fore.

Carles Baiges Camprubí: For us, there was a fear, because of the attention and the fact that it was our first major project. We were afraid we'd reached the top before we'd even started. And then what? Now that we've completed three other similar projects, we've overcome that fear and we're happy that each project brings its own uniqueness. There's continuity in the things we do from one project to the next. La Borda isn't iconic, because it's not meant to be unique, but we're quite amused to see projects coming along that use La Borda as a reference.  We consider this kind of reaching out great. What's less amusing is the media frenzy, with all the confusion that entails. A few days ago, an article on another cooperative project used the image of La Bora to illustrate an interview; it makes no sense.  On the other hand, this media success has raised interest for co-operative housing.