Publication
Between 2002 and 2004 Martin Steinmann gave a close insight to the urban villa, a building type well-known a century ago in our cities and recently brought to the foreground as a major architectural issue in the German speaking part of Switzerland. Through an article1, an exhibition2 and his architectural design teaching at the EPFL3 he introduced various interpretations of a pre-existing housing type's new identity, which this dissertation suggests to further investigate. In the spirit of a monographic contribution, we analyze the urban villa as a multi-unit housing type through its key historical moments, from the rented houses of Lausanne built around 1900 (Part I – Première actualité) until contemporary outstanding realisations (Part III – Nouvelle actualité). Through a typo-morphologic analysis and a sensitive reading of space, major issues such as the urban villa's placement among its surroundings, the subtle amalgamation of individuality and collectivity, as well as the insertion of a constructed nature into the urban cityscape, arise. In the spirit of a polemic contribution, we consider the ville ouverte issue as an intermediate condition of groups of villas or small blocks enhancing all four orientations (Part II – Habiter la ville ouverte, cinq essais). In order to describe the spatial mechanisms of their so-called urbanity, we analyse some coherent groups of urban forms, which belong to the hygienist era running from 1850 until 1930. Those correspond to various programmatic motivations and socio-economical conditions, whose architectural effects we highlight. The contribution of this research is particularly important in view of contemporary residential areas' densification, for it is a densification willingly crystallizing into open urban forms composed of small multi-unit blocks. As neat as they may be, those buildings have not much to offer other than merely "a cute view", "the freshening greenery around the house" or "that big balcony". In his article in 2002 Steinmann proposed a more complex reading of this open urban forms' architecture, which he based on "the sensitive experiences' density". Through the writer's references, a tendency to interpret urban space as a fluid sequence is made apparent. In the Introduction, we thus describe this affinity as "nemourian imaginary"4. Consequently, this preference invites us to speculate towards other imaginaries, rooted as well in the histories of the green city and of the intermediary scale open morphology. In these imaginaries, the plots5, the street6, the court7, or even the private garden8, participate in various scenarios of free space partitioning, between the individual and the collective whole. Finally, to expand the research field will serve to enrich the contemporary urbanism theories that pertain to free spaces, whose plurality of characters, uses and sensations we plead for. The term "urban villa"9 contains a semantic paradox full of promises. In its loneliness, the urban vill
Marine Françoise Jeannine Villaret