ETH tests housing of the future

The prevailing housing model today is still the single-family home, with a floor plan designed to suit the needs of the conventional nuclear family, complete with kitchen, living room, master bedroom and children’s rooms, explains Elli Mosayebi, Architect and ETH Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH), in a press release. She says modern forms of housing have long since moved away from this concept, with the way we live having become more individual and the number of single-person households steadily increasing. According to ETH, one-third of the flats in the canton of Zurich are single occupancy, representing a wide variety of living situations, including students, multilocal dwellers, widowed and divorced people.

Elli Mosayebi has developed a modern small home for single persons and couples, which has now been built on ETH’s Hönggerberg campus. This home can be adapted to the resident with movable elements and accommodate a broad range of lifestyles.

Over the course of a year, a total of 40 testers will take turns spending a week in the home on the ETH campus. They will note down their experiences in a daily journal. Sensors measuring the angle of rotation will also record when and how often the residents use the movable elements.

Findings from the experiment will then flow directly into a new construction project: if all goes well, a real estate developer plans to build Elli Mosayebi’s small homes in a new housing development for the city of Zurich.