Days and Nights of Small Shop Owners

Neighborhood life plays a vital role in the care of aging citizens. Belonging to a community and sharing a similar environment acts as a layer of domesticity within the urban fabric.

The documentary “Days and Nights of Demetra K.” highlights the importance of small businesses in maintaining this domesticity. Demetra, a sex worker, owns the oldest brothel in Athens' Kypseli district. The film follows her daily and nightly life in the brothel and the neighborhood. For Demetra, the notion of home, family and domesticity is dismantled on the urban scale, with a mutual care between her as the client and the shop owners.

In Zurich’s district 5, affordable small businesses have been pushed out of the city through gentrification. Their remaining network is not enough to sustain a similar situation as in Athens.

The supermarkets and shops in and around Hauptbahnhof offer certain affordable shopping possibilities within walking distance. However through their scale and anonymity, the care and exchange between clients and shop owners is getting lost, weakening the domesticity of the neighborhood.

Learning from Demetra’s routine, to bring back small businesses in the Kreis 5 can serve as a form of care for the ageing population, fuel social interactions and strengthen neighborhood.

The project is located in an existing car parking structure next to the main station of Zürich. The building’s existing prefabricated concrete elements are fully reused, half of them stacked on the other half, and the ramps put on the roof and next to the building.

The ground floor is completely public, with the lowest level left for car parking. The east- south side that used to be 4 levels high becomes an open public space. In the 1st to the 5th floors, shops and housing merge into one typology. They are accessible by the public street in the air on the façade.

One flat always has a big room and a kitchen to the shopping-street in the air and the private rooms to the other calmer side. Every second of these rooms is a joker room. The kitchen and the big room can be used as a commercial space when needed and wanted, with a window system becoming a vitrine and a sales area. The rooms overlooking the street in the air are equipped with a system of polycarbonate blinds, made out of the former neon light protections of the car parking.

Every floor has a big shared room to the south façade for the inhabitants, and the roof terrace is publicly accessible, animated by weekly markets and flea markets, as on the ground floor in front of the building. By merging housing and commercial activity, this project tries to give the possibility for affordable housing and working in the same neighborhood for shop owners, but also to give elderly people living in this building or in proximity a vertical network of care and social interactions, and the accessibility to affordable shopping in walking distance.

Project by: Pierre Eichmeyer

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

Master Thesis: Spring 2025