Five Good Swiss Plans

Apartment floor plans profoundly influence our daily lives. In the last 30 years, flexible floor plans with undesignated uses have gradually established themselves as an ideal in Swiss residential architecture.

An in-depth study initiated by two Australian universities investigated this highly relevant architectural theme, demonstrating how contemporary housing floor plans can be adapted to changing requirements over the years. Key aspects include taking into account that an apartment’s residents are no longer pre-defined (thereby moving on from the traditional nuclear family), as well as the questions of how spatial qualities and the positions of doors either enable or prevent specific lifestyles.

In this volume, five Swiss architects present “good plans” designed by their practices, using short texts and images:

• Elli Mosayebi (EMI Architekten)
• Jeannette Kuo (Karamuk Kuo Architects)
• Maria Conen (Conen Sigl Architekt:innen)
• Thomas Padmanabhan (Lütjens Padmanabhan Architekten)
• Philipp Esch (Esch Sintzel Architekten)

The book is supplemented with essays by Irina Davidovici (ETH Zurich), Jonathan Sergison (USI Mendrisio), Alan Pert (University of Melbourne) and the editors Kate Finning (University of Melbourne) and Guillermo Fernández-Abascal (University of Sydney).