If a couple lives in a three-room flat, it has a floor area of around 80 square metres. With a storey height of 3 metres, that's 240 cubic metres. With a cellar compartment and a share of the stairwell, we might end up with 260, whereas a contemporary detached house has a volume of over 1,000 cubic metres. With a garage and cellar, we often end up with 1,200. I looked through my own designs: There was only one detached house under 1,000, so we're talking about a volume ratio of 1:4 compared to a three-room flat.
If we take 2,200 of these detached houses, we already reach a built volume larger than the Cheops pyramid (at 2.6 million cubic metres). However, if we assume that no more than two adults actually live in a single-family home, then 4,400 inhabitants live in this building volume. If we add two children, we just reach the population of a small market town. That's not really a lot.
In addition, the population structure of houses is changing dramatically: According to the Federal Statistical Office, a third of all people over the age of 65 live alone, and the figure for women is as high as 45%.* Some people haven't paid off their house yet. Understand me correctly, I am happy about every customer who wants a detached house from me. Everyone should be happy in his own way. But to be happy, you have to know what you're getting into.
What is the global view of things? We live on a planet with a rapidly growing population, which is also urbanising. This means that fewer and fewer people will live in the countryside, where detached houses are cheap. Forecasts say that by 2050, two thirds of humanity will live in cities.** I don't want to imagine that these people will all move into dull residential silos. So the next 80 years will not be about breaking the skyscraper record in Dubai. The most important task of architecture today will be to make living in a multi-storey flat as attractive as possible. This applies to the flat itself, but the design of the urban environment is at least as important. Urban environment sounds academic. What is it? When I can reach a chemist, a bakery, a butcher, a supermarket, a general practitioner and a flower shop without even turning the ignition key. An urban environment is when I can get to a colonoscopy without a driving licence. What has developed over the last 70 years has been functionally separated and motorised settlements. So rather the opposite.
After the war, our taste in music, our fashion and our eating habits became Americanised. Our relationship with land has also changed. In many communities, the best farmland was abandoned to make way for new housing estates. Our landscape planning has also become Americanised - the only difference being that Germany is seven times more densely populated than the USA. Even densely populated states such as Florida or New York State are far below the German population quotient. So we can ask the question: How much longer will our country be able to provide 500 cubic metres of new construction per adult per generation?
We must first evaluate and improve the mistakes made in post-war housing construction in East and West Germany. From hundreds of discussions with building owners, I have learnt so far that post-war multi-storey flats have a very bad reputation: Pergolas, slab facades, paneled buildings, dull repetition units, dark interior corridors, loo windows facing the street, unstructured building masses, dark stairwells, compressed window formats, roller blinds halfway down, stingy storey heights, low ceilings, artificial light bathrooms. These are the horrors of the post-war period. On the other hand, we have old flats in large cities that are very popular. When estate agents advertise them, the ad is usually removed from the internet after 20 minutes because 50 applications have already been received. Try searching for "old building in Haidhausen". We have to learn what makes these neighbourhoods so attractive and adapt them. It's not about novelty or originality. Novelty was a category of the 1920s, when nobody could have guessed what victims the air war would claim. It is always worth starting an experiment, because buildings are subject to an evolutionary process: some types remain, others disappear.

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* https://www.destatis.de/…/Zahl…/2018/PD18_49_p002.html and https://www.destatis.de/…/2020/03/PD20_N014_122.html

** https://de.statista.com/…/anteil-der-bevoelkerung-in…/

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First published on Facebook on 06.02.2021