Blind Spot Einfamilienhaus

The detached house is not a marginal private issue, but a blind spot in architecture. As part of Open Design Week, this talk explores why the most common form of housing, of all things, is so rarely treated as an architectural challenge – even though it continues to have a decisive influence on urban space, resource consumption and our ideas about living. Building on the themes of the ‘Suburbia’ exhibition at the DAM, the talk focuses on the question of data: what do we actually know about this housing stock, what is missing – and how can a concrete design and construction brief be developed from a supposedly rigid typology?

The lecture views the detached house not as a nostalgic dream home, but as a zone of conflict between land consumption, the logic of ownership and spatial sustainability. It is precisely here that its leverage lies: as a typology that exists in vast numbers yet has scarcely been addressed architecturally, the detached house is a central starting point for rethinking ‘building on existing structures’ as a design strategy.

Our thesis is: It is not only the new that can be designed, but precisely the existing – in particular the detached house – as a hitherto underestimated collective architectural task.

Andreas Hild and Valerie Kronauer, Technical University of Munich

TUM School of Engineering and Design

Chair of Design, Renovation and Conservation

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TUM Research Cluster on the Detached House