Mätti Wüthrich and Eva Maria Küpfer are “hall house” veterans. In 1999, Mätti, a senior campaigner at Greenpeace, started squatting with a group of a dozen or so people in a former paint factory in Zurich as part of an experimental flat-sharing community and stayed for 15 years. Eva, a choreographer, dancer, and massage therapist, first lived in a squat house in the early aughts, calling a disused wine-bottling plant at the edge of the city her home. She later moved into the former paint factory where Mätti was living, and the two became a couple, going on to live with a dozen others in a former Suzuki sales office.
In these underutilized or abandoned industrial buildings, people like Mätti and Eva created their own living spaces using compact, mobile structures that could be easily stacked or moved within a communal, open floor plan. “Instead of big rooms and a small common space, we had small rooms and big space,” Mätti says. Large gatherings like community discussions, performances, or parties could be held in those shared areas.
This kind of squatting ramped up in Zurich in
