A society’s attitudes towards its ageing citizens come across in the most unexpected ways; not least, the language used to describe them. In 1928, Zurich’s first official competition program for an Altersheim, an old people’s home, referred to the residents as Insassen, “inmates,” while the building was die Anstalt, “the institution.”1 This institutional slant permeated the participants’ and the jury’s understanding alike. In designing a living environment for the elderly, all prized entries drew upon hospital architecture rather than residential models. Municipal competitions for Altersheime, which in Zurich peaked in the 1950s and 1960s, long continued to adopt such clinical connotations.2
In recent decades, an alternative narrative has come to challenge the causality between older persons’ living and institutionalized care. A recent issue of the Swiss architectural journal werk, bauen + wohnen criticized the standard conceptions of older persons’ homes as “not so much a form of housing as one of nursing care.”3 In the editorial, historian Daniel Kurz argued that housing for older people should not radically differ from all other forms of housing. The issue highlighted collective living configurations as valuable alternatives to the ubiquitous, yet ill-fitting format of nuclear-family dwellings inhabited by one or two elderly people long after their children had left home. In exploring alternatives, Kurz defined the conditions necessary for “autonomy in advanced age”: integration in social life, access to smaller, affordable, and barrier-free homes, and proximity to healthcare infrastructure. He also highlighted that, despite not differing greatly from widely available typologies, this relatively scarce form of housing remained available only to a privileged minority. Zurich, however, is a privileged location whose constellation of not-for-profit housing in municipal, cooperative, and foundation ownership provides several innovative models for housing people in retirement.
A Canonical Solution for Elderly Urban Living
A very large number of single-family dwellings were constructed in Zurich in the 1920s and 1930s in order to cater to its growing industrial workforce. Nevertheless, at the time, the needs of the working class beyond retirement were not taken into account. In the postwar years, this led to a spike in demand for affordable pensioners’ housing. It was in response to this situation that the Zurich Foundation for Retirement Homes (Stiftung Alterswohnungen der Stadt Zürich, or SAW) was established in 1950.4 Its first housing development project, the Espenhof estate, built in 1952, consisted of 158 small dwellings for people over sixty. Espenhof’s compact, self-contained studios, supplemented by communal and healthcare facilities, shaped the Swiss canon of elderly people’s housing over the next decades.
With Espenhof, SAW also inaugurated a financial model with echoes of social welfare. Its affordable rents, which covered less than half of the building and maintenance costs, were complemented by non-repayable contributions from the city. Fifteen more municipal SAW estates for seniors were built up until the economic bust of the 1970s, when city subsidies sharply declined. But with assistance from cantonal and federal funds, the foundation became self-sufficient in 1979, and in 2006 it received a further cash injection of public funds for further subsistence.
Over the decades, SAW has maintained the model of small affordable apartments for one- to two-person households grouped in tight retirement communities. Today, the foundation operates in over thirty estates, offering some 2,000 affordable apartments as well as social activities and access to medical care. The dwellings are provided in a variety of types and leases, sometimes occupying only one or two floors in multi-story buildings developed by cooperatives or the city.
The accelerated demand for elderly housing following the mass construction of single-family housing decades earlier that led to the foundation of SAW in the 1950s illustrates a recurrent pattern. Young families in Switzerland are at the center of socially oriented housing programs, which often neglect their changing needs over a longer duration. In Zurich, following the extension of the city in 1934, the construction of suburban cooperative garden cities peaked in the 1940s and 1950s. And once again, this surplus of family dwellings resulted, decades later, in large numbers of elderly residents living by themselves in the spacious apartments where they had raised their average 2.4 children.
Since the late 1990s, under growing demographic, financial, and political pressures, large swathes of these peripheral districts have been subjected to redevelopment. Ersatzneubau, the practice of urban densification through the replacement of older structures, disproportionately affects the more vulnerable and less well-off social groups, specifically the elderly, and often leads to their displacement. Framed in the 1990s and early 2000s as a positive instrument for urban renewal, Ersatzneubau has increasingly emerged as morally and environmentally ambivalent, with sustainable renewal masking a rise in rents and spatial consumption. It is in this gray area of new construction that cooperative and municipal housing, driven by not-for-profit logics, have been able to experiment with new housing typologies that can also impact elderly living.
Alternatives to the Canon
While Zurich’s historical blind spot for elderly residents has affected all types of housing providers, non-profit housing is generally better placed to flexibly respond to their specific needs. For over a century, a political and financial partnership between a social-democratic-led Zurich and its housing cooperatives has led to the articulation of affordable housing model prototypes which, once tried and tested, are absorbed into the market. The Zurich municipality and housing cooperatives alike view housing primarily as a social resource, not a commodity. This attitude has enabled housing cooperatives to react to changing societal trends faster than the risk-averse market, fostering innovative experimentation.
Two models pioneered by cooperatives have, in their focus on third-age autonomy, led to the development of practical alternatives to institutionalized elderly care: the so-called WG (Wohngemeinschaft, or “flat-sharing community”) and the Clusterwohnung (“cluster apartment”). In a WG, people have private rooms for sleeping and working and share collective facilities such as kitchens, dining rooms, living rooms, and bathrooms. Conversely, cluster apartments consist of autonomous studios, each with one or two bedrooms, private bathrooms, and tiny kitchenettes, which are gathered around larger common facilities such as living and dining rooms and a larger kitchen.
As a residential format, the WG is not restricted to non-profit housing. On the contrary, it emerged out of the necessity, for single people especially, to split the higher rents usually associated with family dwellings. A widely established model in Northern European and German-speaking countries, it is usually inhabited by students and young people before marriage and children. Its ubiquity is grounded in adaptability, as WGs do not require a specific dwelling layout, but rather can be established in existing housing by assigning one or two persons per bedroom. In contrast, the cluster apartments are a recent residential typology developed by housing cooperatives as part of their ongoing experimentation with innovative forms of communal living.5 Due to their novelty and typological specificity, clusters have not yet been associated with a particular age group. However, they require custom spatial planning, and therefore can only be implemented either in new construction or through extensive refurbishment. Unlike older housing cooperatives in Zurich that historically catered to nuclear families, cluster apartments and WGs are frequently adopted by newer Zurich housing cooperatives, proving specifically advantageous for their older residents.
Multi-Generational Living in Heizenholz
Established in 1995 from a grassroots neighborhood association, Kraftwerk1 belongs to the generation of Zurich housing cooperatives rooted in the youth movement of the 1980s.6 Building up on the squatting practices of its founding members, Kraftwerk1 positions itself as a “development laboratory for new forms of living” with an explicitly environmental focus.7 Its first development, Hardturm, was built in a “brown belt” area dominated by light industry and office buildings, alongside important yet isolated working-class housing estates.8 In this heterogeneous, tough setting, Hardturm experimented with a mix of communal and family dwelling types and incorporated collective and social facilities including a nursery, health food store, bar, assembly room, and communal roof terrace.9 At the time of its completion in 2001, most inhabitants were quite young, and older generations remained underrepresented (although, after twenty years, this is no longer the case). This lack of diversity was perceived as a shortcoming, which was later addressed in Kraftwerk1’s follow-up development, Heizenholz.
From the outset, Heizenholz was conceived as a softer complement to Hardturm. Located in a residential suburb, it was explicitly oriented towards the elderly and families, and continues to host, to this day, a smaller and more intimate multi-generational community. On a plot leased from the Zurich Children’s and Youth Homes Foundation, the cooperative was invited in 2008 to redevelop two identical 1970s five-story blocks that had previously hosted an orphanage. Their floor plans, divided into small rooms, were well suited to being converted into collective dwellings. The new building program was developed through an open and public participatory process guided by the cooperative.10 The group of interested participants included many older people who expressed the desire to develop a multi-generational project with dwelling types that would appeal to all ages. As a first step, the cooperative developed a “housing program,” not in terms of spatial distribution, but of needs. Alongside the established collective format of the WG, this led to the inclusion, for the first time, of cluster apartments.11
Of the five architects invited to submit a feasibility study, Adrian Streich’s winning proposal explored the concept of a communal terrace that connected the two existing buildings with a generous, partly open, seven-story structure. Towering over the two existing blocks, this bridge provides an external covered circulation, with shared communal verandas on each floor and a large roof terrace. Catering to the needs of people over sixty, all twenty-nine apartments and shared spaces have barrier-free access. The various flat layouts suit the changing needs of residents over time: from one-bedroom flats to two large WGs for eight people and two cluster apartments for up to ten. The dwellings can be reached not only by interior stairs and elevator, but also from the external communal stair that opens onto the wide shared terrace.
Two WGs and two cluster apartments take up more than a third of Heizenholz’s total residential space.12 With inhabitants ranging in age from children to those beyond retirement, these collective dwellings are organized into associations, which are classed as legal persons and can therefore enter into rental contracts with the cooperative. Claudia Thiesen, an architect who, at the time of construction, was on Kraftwerk1’s management board, has lived in one of the multi-generational WGs since 2012. These large dwellings, with dynamic communities and active social lives, also have the greatest number of people moving in and out. For Thiesen, living in collective settings requires “a certain mindset,” a willingness to put common interest above one’s own, and the ability to reach and abide by mutual agreements.13 Many of Heizenholz’s residents were accustomed to communal life in WGs before moving into the building.14
In Heizenholz people over sixty, sometimes over eighty, live in the flats, WGs, and cluster units, either alone or in couples. In the absence of in-house medical care or specialized supervision, neighbors provide social contact and an informal network of support. For Thiesen, the question of autonomous elderly living is defined by their ability to choose how, and where, they spend their time. In Heizenholz, these choices—whether people spend time in one’s own room, the shared living room, the large kitchen, the terrace, or the garden—were considered at the time of planning, and are articulated by the architecture. This can be seen in the many different routes that are present throughout the building, which each offer different possibilities of contact: whether one uses the internal or external stairs, or crosses the verandas, passing by peoples’ living rooms and sometimes even stopping by. The building’s openness, its proximity to nature, and good connections to the city gives older people great control over how they spend their time, while being integrated into a dynamic and well-balanced community.
Elder Cluster Living in Hornbach
The provision of cluster apartments in Hornbach, a recent municipal housing estate, signals the absorption of this communal residential model into local authority housing. Completed in 2021, Hornbach features 125 affordable, high-quality dwellings in the heart of Seefeld, a lakeside quarter that has been transformed over the past twenty years by an influx of expat professionals, and whose gentrification was so intense it received its own name: “Seefeldization.”15 In this context, Hornbach represents a rare victory of political clout over market logic.16 The estate, consisting of two partial urban blocks, was commissioned through an architectural competition that was won by Kaschka Knapkiewicz and Axel Fickert in 2012. To encourage a good demographic mix, Hornbach mostly offers apartments suitable for families with children. For its fewer smaller flats, older applicants were prioritized. The mix of dwellings also includes two large cluster apartments, one of which was allocated to an association promoting collective living for people over sixty.
The association’s move into the Hornbach cluster apartment was the culmination of a long process, initiated ten years earlier by a small group of neighbors in the nearby municipal estate Tiefenbrunnen, where they had lived there since its completion in 1991, raising their families there and contributing to its social life. Some of these people already had experiences with collective living, only reverting to nuclear family dwellings after the birth of their second or third child. When plans for the development of a new municipal housing estate (the future Hornbach) became public, they were contemplating a later stage of their lives, during which they would have different needs. They would need less space yet more accessibility, and preferably stay in the same neighborhood, living close to one another.
In 2011, the group approached the city with the proposal, which was adopted, to include collective dwellings for the elderly in the competition brief. Subsequently, in 2016, the group formed the association Community Living in Old Age (Gemeinschaftliches Wohnen im Alter, or GWA) and studied different forms of collective living—visiting several cooperatives (including Heizenholz) to see how they worked in practice. The letter of motivation that GWA attached to their Hornbach application in 2020 listed some advantages their move would bring to the municipality, including freeing up the larger flats where they were still living. However, behind the pragmatic arguments stood a simpler motivation: “Living together in the cluster apartment in the Hornbach housing estate makes our vision a reality: to grow old at home.”17
GWA was eventually selected as the future tenant of a cluster apartment, and four couples moved into the three-story unit in the summer of 2021. The cluster apartment consists of four compact studios, each with two small rooms, a bathroom, and a kitchenette. These are dispersed among collectively shared areas, including a double-height living room, a large kitchen with double appliances, a communal dining room, and a well-planted roof terrace overlooking the lake. The residents take turns cooking in the evenings, and anyone is allowed to join the evening meal and bring guests along. A weekly schedule, with “who is cooking today / who is eating in” written on top, is taped to the kitchen wall. Remaining meals are organized individually. An additional one-bedroom studio is reserved for visitors, but could also be used on a permanent basis by a single person over sixty. The rental contract specifies this as the minimum age for all long-term residents.
The cluster community of four couples is finely tuned. It is too small and too recent to anticipate how a more dynamic pace of change, which is typical in a WG, would affect it. When one couple moved out after three years, there were concerns about finding a good replacement quickly enough. Coincidentally, the couple that ended up moving in were already familiar with communal forms of living: they had been long-term members of the Karthago Cooperative, founded in 1995 by the eponymous squatting collective, and had over thirty years of WG experience.18
Collective life in the cluster triplex at Hornbach is harmonious yet delicately balanced. Living together, especially for the elderly, requires the flexibility to negotiate, and a careful choreography of coordination around everyday decisions. At the time of my visit to Hornbach, on a weekday morning, I was shown around by Elisabeth Bauer, one of the people who initiated discussions with the city fifteen years earlier, and her partner. While we talked on a planted roof terrace, two other members of the household were pensively circling a raised threshold to the dining room, a potentially dangerous transition in the otherwise barrier-free apartment. They considered how the step could be widened to prevent falls. The common areas—neatly kept and clearly domestic—are free of that “uninhabited” feeling that is common both to institutional living rooms and short-term lets. The double-height living room and library, the generous sunny kitchen, and the terraces with lake views are above average living standards in any part of the city. Gardening duties are mostly the responsibility of one couple, but everyone else helps. It is in the private areas, which one can only access upon invitation, that the personal touches of the residents’ lives become most visible. The small bedrooms and/or workrooms overflow with memorabilia, plants, books, and artworks, which represent the tastes and desires of each couple much more than the negotiated comfort of the grander common rooms.
The Hornbach cluster apartment for the elderly illustrates both the benefits of the model and its limitations. For all its comforts, communal living also entails relinquishing one’s privacy as a disposable luxury. At the same time, not least due to its extraordinary location and the high quality of the architecture, the cluster apartment appears as an exclusive solution for a fortunate minority, one that is well informed and educated in the ways of self-organization, collective co-habitation, and conflict mediation. The spacious, complex, and highly tailored layout could only be built from scratch, or would otherwise require extensive refurbishment, including joining two or even three more conventional apartments together. And yet, the exceptional occurrence of a cluster apartment in a municipal housing setting signals an interesting exchange of knowledge. A residential format previously associated with experimental cooperatives has been adopted by local authority housing, with the potential to spread further and become a standard in the evolving housing market.
Epilogue: Getting Old Together at Home
In 2025, the Swiss Federal Office for Housing (Bundesamt für Wohnungswesen, BWO) commissioned a report on the living conditions and mobility of people over 76.19 This is the age bracket of “fragile old age” that most of the occupants of the WGs and cluster apartments in Heizenholz and Hornbach are yet to reach. The report’s findings highlight a barely surprising paradox. Although 73 percent of people aged over 76 in Switzerland live in multi-occupancy buildings, 77 percent live alone or with people from the same age group, while a further 12 percent live with people who are only slightly younger, aged 66–75. These statistics hide a majority of lonely and isolated elderly people, mostly women, who are especially at risk when living by themselves, despite proximity to neighbors. Most of the people in this vulnerable age bracket have lived in the same accommodation for a long time, often decades. While this ensures affordability and the security of long-term contracts, it also means the majority (63 percent) of their homes were built before 1980 and do not meet current standards for barrier-free access. And given the limitations to their mobility and the health risks involved, only a small percentage of people over 76 (5 percent in 2022) move houses, half of whom move directly into care homes.
The report urges the integration of older residents into the “regular” housing market, with the provision of support at home to enable them to live independently for as long as possible. Recent, albeit marginal, developments in elderly housing models are not even considered. Instead, the onus in “autonomy” shifts from architecture, community, and collective forms of living onto infrastructures of specialized care, paid for by insurance, the elderly residents, or their families.
The very existence of the federal report suggests that pressure for elderly housing will grow in the foreseeable future. Demographic patterns show that change is inevitable, but mainstream solutions are not equipped to deal with the challenge; society itself seems unprepared. Moreover, this pressure is not only demographic; it is also environmental. In a city where the average living space per person is forty square meters and growing (fifty square meters in Seefeld and across Switzerland), collective living typologies, while still marginal, are more sustainable. In Hornbach, the average surface use per person is twenty-nine square meters; in Heizenholz, it is thirty-five. In their move from Tiefenbrunnen to Hornbach, GWA members vacated four flats that averaged 125 square meters each.20 This economy of resources goes beyond occupied space and construction costs, extending to energy, heating, and appliances. Yet, all this is discretionary and voluntary. No one should expect or force people to leave the premises they have inhabited for decades.
Cluster and WG formats are still far from becoming mainstream. Even in Zurich, they remain non-systemic exceptions, tightly tied to specific constellations of people, circumstances, and opportunities. Market housing is anonymous and speculative. Most often it doesn’t take into account how it is used after occupation, nor does it consider the human factor that is so decisive in living collectively. Cooperatives, and to a lesser extent, the city, have honed, over decades, mechanisms of moderation and conflict resolution that are necessary for living in common. These mechanisms remain alien to the market, which is still predicated upon individual liberty over the common good—as long as it’s paid for in profitable rents.
Both cluster apartments and WGs are well suited to enable the co-habitation of people who are at different life stages and not (necessarily) connected by family ties. This differs from conventional housing for elderly people, even such as what SAW provides (affordable, accessible, yet separate small flats). In addition to the private rooms or studios that Heizenholz and Hornbach offer, a wide range of spaces, internal and external, guarantees both privacy and contact. The premise of spending more time at home is translated in these projects into opportunities to decide how to spend one’s time during the day. But one’s activities and living environment are gently regulated by decisions taken in common, which extend to chores, responsibilities, reducing one’s own belongings to fit in a much smaller amount of space, and sharing household objects and appliances. Thus, collective living for the elderly is highly dependent on the specific people choosing to live together, and is vulnerable to the inevitable passage of time.
In Zurich, the alliance between cooperatives and the city, and the dialogues between private citizens and institutions, have brought innovative living formats closer to the mainstream housing market. In particular, the municipality’s adoption of an experimental residential format, initiated by squatting communities and subsequently developed in the legal framework of cooperatives, shows an enlightened knowledge exchange from the informal to the formal, from the bottom-up to the top-down—and increasingly, from the youth to the elderly. A society whose elders are empowered to adapt their lives to alternative models for living in common shows a marked progress from the institutionalized elderly care exercised by earlier generations towards autonomous modes of living in the community.
Daniel Weiss, “Wo alte menschen wohnen,” Hochparterre Wettbewerbe 53, no. 2 (2025): 94.
Linked to its emergence as an industrial center, Zurich’s institutionalized care for the elderly had long been associated with hospital-like settings. Its first modern infrastructure in that regard was the Pfrundshaus (almshouse) St. Leonard, designed in 1840–42 by Leonhard Zeugheer, the architect of the cantonal hospital. Built on a prominent urban site and to the latest standards of care, the Pfrundhaus was nevertheless a strict institution for mainly poor people, for example retired servants. These were obliged upon entry to donate their possessions, take on household duties, and were subject to strict house rules including a curfew until 1929. Only from the mid-1960s could residents own their own key and be free to come and go without permission. On the next plot to the Pfrundhaus was later built the Bürgerasyl, meant for better-off citizens, who could afford paying rent, and were free to come and go as they pleased. See Janis Sigg, “Bürgerasyl-Pfrundhaus – Medizinhistorisches Zürich,” ➝.
Daniel Kurz, “Is Housing for Old Age Really So Different?,” in werk, bauen + wohnen 9 Autonom im Alter (2019): 2.
See “Eine sozialpolitische Pionierleistung seit 1950,” SAW, accessed July 10, 2025, ➝.
See Andreas Hofer, “Von Der Familienwohnung Zum Cluster-Grundriss,” Tec21 23, no. 7 (11 February 2011): 23–32.
Others include Wogeno, Karthago, Dreieck, and Kalkbreite. For more on the younger generation of Zurich cooperatives see Irina Davidovici, “Ideology and Collective Life: Zurich’s New Cooperatives,” in New Housing in Zurich. Typologies for a Changing Society, ed. Dominique Boudet (Zurich: Park Book, 2017), 203–8; Irina Davidovici, “Co-Op City: Utopia and Pragmatism in Zurich’s Co-Operative Housing,” in Housing the Co-Op. A Micro-Political Manifesto, ed. Sascha Delz et al. (Berlin: Ruby Press, 2020), 177–92.
“Portrait,” Kraftwerk1 Building and Housing Cooperative Zurich, Switzerland, accessed 2 July 2025, ➝.
See Martin Blum et al., KraftWerk 1: Projekt für das Sulzer-Escher Wyss Areal (Zürich: Paranoia-City, 1993).
See “Kraftwerk1 Hardturm,” Kraftwerk1 Building and Housing Cooperative Zurich, Switzerland, accessed 2 July 2025, ➝.
For more on the initial consultation processes see Marco Hoffmann and Andreas Huber, Begleitstudie Kraftwerk1 Heizenholz: 2010–2014 (Zürich: ImmoQ, 2014), 18–23.
See Hofer, “Von Der Familienwohnung Zum Cluster-Grundriss.”
Of ca. 3,150 m2 residential space, the WGs and clusters take ca. 1,200 m2. See the building’s spatial and room program at ➝, accessed 18 October 2025.
Claudia Thiesen in conversation with the author, Kraftwerk1 Heizenholz, Zurich Höngg, June 19, 2025.
Hoffmann and Huber, Begleitstudie Kraftwerk1 Heizenholz: 2010–2014.
More than 40 percent of Seefeld inhabitants are non-Swiss, mostly from Germany followed by France, Italy, Spain, the US, and UK. For more information see Statistics Office of the City of Zurich, Quartierspiegel Seefeld 2025, July 2025, ➝, 3, 17–19.
In the absence of municipal land reserves in Seefeld, the site was secured through changes in the planning law. See “Mehr bezahlbarer Wohnraum im Quartier,” Stadt Zürich, ➝.
Translated freely from the letter of motivation written as part of GWA’s application for Hornbach housing, October 2020. Letter shared courtesy of Elisabeth Bauer.
Initially a squatter’s group that occupied a contested site in Stauffacher, in central Zurich, Kartago was later constituted as an association, then in 1995, as a cooperative, which allowed its members the financial conditions to raise capital and purchase property. The Karthago cooperative is located in an existing building refurbished to accommodate WGs and a large communal kitchen.
Leonard Fister et al., Wohnen im Alter. Eine empirische Untersuchung
der Wohnsituation und -mobilität älterer Menschen in der Schweiz (Bundesamt für Wohnungswesen, Bern, 2025).
Data extracted from the presentation “Ideenskizze der Gruppe Gemeinschaftliches Wohnen im Alter” (Ideas Sketch of the Group Communal Living in Old Age) made by the Tiefenbrunnen residents to the City of Zurich Real Estate in 2011, courtesy of Elisabeth Bauer.