Public Lecture: Towards sustainable neighbourhoods

Andreas Hofer, "Towards sustainable neighbourhoods – Beyond labels and certificates and creating the city of tomorrow"

followed by panel discussion with

Claude Ballini, Constance Carr, and Marco Hoffmann

Tuesday 09.12.2014 19.00-20.30, UniLu, Campus Limpertsberg, Room BS 1.03

During recent years a range of exemplary housing projects were built in Zurich. Apart from offering new building typologies and deploying sustainable building technologies, these projects feature high quality ground floor spaces and landscape architecture, in search for more integrated neighbourhoods. Most of these projects were built by cooperatives. These cooperatives today are very important for the social integration in a rich city, in continuation of their pioneering role in the twenties and thirties, when they brought new concepts as the «Garden City» and the modernist architecture to Zurich.

Besides technical innovations, as multi-storey wood constructions, building integrated photovoltaic and low energy concepts, social and economic issues play a key role. In a society where a majority of all flats are inhabited by single person households (mostly elderly people), new concepts beyond the traditional family oriented typologies are crucial. Bigger projects as ‘Kalkbreite’ and ‘Mehr als wohnen’ combine these typological experiments into complex buildings with public and commercial functions and therefore try to become new nodes of solidarity and integration on a city scale.

Andreas Hofer received his diploma in architecture at The Swiss Institute of Technology in Zurich in 1989. Since then he works as an architect and planner. In 1995 he founded with partners the office Archipel in Zurich. He initiated the cooperative project KraftWerk1 in 1993. He was member of the management board till 2003. Today he works as a project developer for the cooperative. From 2003 till 2010 he was member of the management board of the Zurich branch of the Swiss Housing Association (the alliance of all housing cooperatives in the Zurich region). Since 2008 he works as a project manager for the experimental housing project „mehr als wohnen“. Andreas Hofer taught at the Institute „Natural and Social Science Interface“ at the department for Environmental Sciences of the Swiss Institute of Technology (1994 - 2004) and at the Department for Landscape Architecture at the University of Applied Sciences in Rapperswil (2000 - 2009). He publishes regularly articles on housing and planning issues in various journals and lectures at conferences and universities.