Campaign for a fictive housing cooperative
THE SWISSMILL TOWER
As part of Arno Brandlhuber’s ETH studio students were asked to redesign the Swissmill tower, a 118 meter high grain silo, for the hypothetical scenario of a transformation of the tower into residential housing.
The tower has been criticized since before it was built in 2016. It completely alters the skyline of Zurich and now casts a shadow over the Limmat river’s popular bath spots in the middle of the day. Conspiracies have circulated on how “kluger rat notvorrat” - the Swiss national prepping mantra, here’s being used to go around (hitta bättre ord) the detail plan and ultimately gentrify the area of blablavla even further. As the grain silo is not understood as a building in the eyes of the law, rules and legislation on building height doesn’t apply.
However, this whole evil plan to use a 118 meter high concrete tower to disrupt the skyline and thus also future objections against an overall higher building limit seemed unlikely to us to say the least. Who would benefit from this? Swissmill? Why would they want for higher exploration of the surrounding area?
As we began our research, we quickly realized two things. First of all, Swissmill is just one of many daughter companies of Coop – one of Switzerland’s 10 biggest companies with an annual turnover of 42 billion CHF. One of many daughter companies which all are used to extract profit from the main company Coop whose whole sale pitch is to be a cooperative which gives back to its owners: the customers. Instead of lowering prices in the stores, money was transferred to Swissmill among other companies from which the money was extracted to a select few.
The second thing we learnt was that Coop did not only own the Swissmill company and the plot of the grain silo, but all of the adjacent blocks. Conspiracy theories that initially seemed like precisely that: “conspiracy theories”, began to make sense. If the tower is ever going to be redesigned into housing for anyone but the Swiss elite, Coop must start act differently - like the cooperative they claim to be.
SQUATTING THE FUTURE
To help solve the Zurich housing crisis rather than maximizing Coop’s profit extraction, the future of the Swissmill tower was squatted. A new, fictional, daughter company of Coop was founded: the housing cooperative Coop Wohngennosenscaft. The transformation of the Swissmill tower became the first project of Coop’s cooperative housing affiliation(?) and marked a return to a hundred years old idea of the company as a producer of housing.
A massive commercial campaign was launched, advertising 1000 new flats in the Swissmill area. Avsändaren: Coop Wohngennosenscaft - the part of Coop that doesn’t exist, yet everyone needs. Apart from giant posters in buses and subway stops, a thousand letters were posted asking people to sign up for the new housing queu. Everything directed to a website mimicking Coop’s official homepage, and every motivational letter to why one would be among the first to get a rental in the redeveloped tower went straight to the real board of Coop.
Coop Wohngenossenscaft’s website further explained the economic model of the housing cooperative and why it made sense for Coop to take responsibility and help to achieve the right to housing on the scale of the population - beginning with Zurich.