Sustainable Reshaping

This project begins with the film Perfect Days by Wim Wenders as a central case study. The film follows Hirayama, an elderly man who cleans public toilets in Tokyo. Each morning he drives through the city, his movements blending into the urban rhythm, almost unnoticed. His labour is essential yet socially invisible. Despite this, Hirayama finds dignity and meaning through daily rituals of self-care: photographing light filtering through leaves, reading, visiting public baths, eating at the same diner, and sharing quiet, repeated encounters with familiar faces. These routines give structure, resilience, and purpose to a life shaped by maintenance work.

Translating this narrative to Zurich reveals similar conditions within the household cleaning sector. In Switzerland, one in seven households employs a cleaner, rising to one in three among high-income households. Yet around 40% of this work remains undeclared. When households act as employers, cleaners often work without contracts, insurance, or pension contributions, placing them in precarious conditions. Digital platforms such as Batmaid.ch have further “uberised” the sector, reinforcing instability and isolation while framing cleaning as unskilled, temporary labour. According to Quitt.ch, 96% of household cleaners are women, most with immigrant backgrounds from Southern Europe, Latin America, and Eastern Europe.

Through the cleaning cooperative Autonomia in Zurich, I interviewed Yajara, 60, from Venezuela, and Rebecca, 42, from Spain. Both described the cooperative as a space of empowerment, offering fair pay, autonomy over working hours, professional training, and German courses. Beyond employment, Autonomia functions as a social infrastructure: women meet for coffee, cook together, exchange shifts, and support one another emotionally. At the same time, long working hours, commuting from peripheral areas, and family separation leave little time for rest, leisure, or care.

At the Hardturm Parkinghouse, the project translates these insights into a housing cooperative specifically for cleaners. The building accommodates permanent residents, temporary stays for newcomers and visiting family members across three floors. Different lengths of stay are deliberately intertwined to encourage mentorship and everyday exchange. The project is structured into three housing clusters, each with its own circulation core, reducing the scale of the building and fostering smaller communities within the larger collective.

Permanent housing units are organized as flexible two-room apartments on the north-western side, allowing residents to adapt their living arrangements according to changing kinship constellations. Every two apartments share a kitchen and bathroom, enabling temporary expansion during family visits or shared living periods. Temporary rooms share collective bathrooms and are more directly connected to collective spaces, creating interaction through visual connections and balconies, helping to prevent isolation.

Architecturally, the intervention is grounded in reuse and transformation. The existing concrete parking structure becomes the project’s primary resource. By cutting openings into the deep slabs, daylight is brought into a 27-meter-deep building with a low ceiling height of 2.46 meters. The extracted concrete is reused as non-load-bearing walls, organized through a modular system derived from the 6.80-meter spacing of the mushroom pillars. A base unit of 1.05 meters allows multiple wall heights and widths. Where concrete is insufficient, wood is introduced as a framing and insulating element.

Concrete remains one of the most overused materials in construction despite its high carbon footprint. Rather than continuing an extractive logic, this project treats existing concrete as a resource to be reshaped. This approach mirrors the project’s social ambition: recognizing cleaners as resilient individuals whose work sustains everyday life.

Project by: Alina Shade

Teaching team: Teaching team: Anna Puigjaner, Dafni Retzepi, Ethel Baraona Pohl, Pol Esteve Castelló, Lisa Maillard, He Shen, He Yufei. In collaboration with BUK.

Master Thesis: Autumn 2025

Images: Luís Úrculo