Site Specific: Kilchberg Apartment Building
Salomé Wackernagel - Zurich, Switzerland, 2023
Salomé Wackernagel is an architect with a pluridisciplinary approach to architecture and one strand of her practice is the renovation of early 20th-century buildings, inspired in part by her investigation of Bauhaus typologies and the work of Charlotte Perriand and Bruno Taut.
This particular project, completed in the summer of 2023, takes a light-touch approach to the building’s robust apartment plans (only one internal partition was removed from each apartment) and, alongside a complete upgrade of the technical installations, introduces a varied palette of ceramic tiles which builds on, but refreshes, the building’s character. A sensitive series of photographs by Philipp Obkircher draws out the precision of the refurbishment and the delicate colours deployed.
SW This modest apartment building in Zurich's quiet Wollishofen district was built in 1937 to accommodate six simple family units. Each unit comprises a large living room and bedroom of identical dimensions, a kitchen opening onto the shared garden, a small bathroom and a toilet adjoining the kitchen, ventilated by an innovative mechanical ventilation system when built. In the basement, the building includes a shared washing machine and drying room with blower, as well as a commercial space rented out to a therapy practice.
Initially built for the working-class population who came to occupy the outskirts of the city in the midst of an industrial boom, these small-scale dwellings are now proving to be totally in tune with a contemporary urban lifestyle, the search for individual housing and the splitting up of nuclear family units. These homes are very much appreciated by their current residents, who value the layout of the interior spaces, the urban qualities of this district designed as an island of greenery in the heart of the city, as well as the particularly affordable rental price compared to market prices in the greater Zurich area.
The electrical and sanitary installations were extremely outdated and have been completely renovated, including minimal remodelling of the spaces. The chromatic composition of the tiles underlines the intervention, while reducing renovation costs to the bare essentials and respecting the period of construction and the context of the architecture. In this respect, the original substance is preserved, without ignoring the authentic character of the buildings, but on the contrary reinforcing it. The qualitative transformation of the spaces plays with modernist concepts: geometric compositions, original elements and chromatic associations, creating a timeless and colourful architecture that enhances the value of the original construction.