9 – 2017

Living in Steel

For a country like Switzerland — the culture of construction differs in different nations — it is not surprising that building materials such as concrete or wood seem more obvious choices. And this does not have to do with their availability alone: The way they are anchored in the mentality thanks to lobbying and marketing is here of equal significance. This issue was produced in close collaboration with the IKE (Institute for Constructive Design) at Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) and the Swiss Steel Construction Centre (SZS). The inspiration was an ideas competition set up by IKE in cooperation with SZS and werk, bauen + wohnen, the results of which are now published here. The question was disarmingly simple: how, against a background of restrictive norms, can new impulses and scope be discovered for architecture, that is to say how can we find an individual aesthetic for building with steel? In combination with other building materials steel develops a constructive potential and a design logic, both of which perhaps go further than those of timber and concrete. The present issue takes this research work further. Alongside a key building by French architects Lacaton & Vassal, which proves the feasibility of steel constructions also in a large scale, we analyze the journalistic event that was godfather to the setting up of the competition, so to speak: the publication of the Californian Case Study Houses in the periodical Arts & Architecture between 1948 and 1966.