The erstwhile architect and writer Max Frisch once wrote that big ideas need big spaces. At least that’s how I remember it. I’d read or heard it somewhere—and ever since have quoted it whenever a bon mot was called for to appear clever, at a dull dinner party for instance, where sources of such bon mots are rarely questioned. Serving up a quotation at dinner is one thing, committing it to print is something else. There’s another sentence I like to pull from my small-talk toolkit. It’s from Eero Saarinen: “If something is too short, make it shorter—if something is too long, make it longer.” I love this Saarinen line, wise and absurd in equal measure; though there’s no evidence he ever said or wrote such a thing. But then: I like the quote, I like Saarinen—they go together perfectly.

But back to Frisch and the big ideas that require big spaces to come into being—allegedly. Even ChatGPT couldn’t or wouldn’t confirm that this actually stems from Frisch. Which also makes me question its veracity: why shouldn’t big ideas also arise in small spaces? In his latest novel, The School of Night, Karl Ove Knausgård writes about a famous artist who can’t bear being at home because his thoughts grow small there: “Being at home during the day was humiliating. Surrounded by all the small things, my thoughts also became small. Flowerpots and carpets and teacups and the little handheld vacuum—who could hold onto anything of value there?”

Only in his large studio was the artist capable of large thoughts. So I ask myself: what is it with writers and these large thoughts? Aren’t big ideas completely overrated? The room where I work is rather small. It sits on the second floor of a building on Feldeggstrasse in a Zurich quarter called Mühlebach, which people usually, but wrongly, call Seefeld. Seefeld only begins on the opposite side of the street. But Seefeld sounds better than Mühlebach. If you ask ChatGPT how it would characterize Seefeld in three words, it says: “urban; elegant; lakeside” (with a hint of latte macchiato 😉). Mühlebach, by contrast, sounds rural, backward, rough.

The room where I work belongs to an apartment whose rooms have been used as offices for quite some time now. Someone sits in each room, quietly practicing their trade: an ethics professor, a journalist, an accountant, a property manager. There’s a shared entrance hall with a black leather sofa that no one ever sits on, a kitchen with a capsule coffee machine and a mostly empty fridge, and a glass ceramic hob that never sees a pan. And naturally, a toilet with a small window overlooking the courtyard, on whose windowsill stands a diffuser with organic room spray called “Stilles Örtchen”—“Quiet Little Place”—with essential oils of grapefruit, citron, lemongrass, Arabic mint and myrtle. I should add immediately: I didn’t buy it.

The room where I work has one decisive advantage: it has its own entrance door, so I don’t have to pass through the adjoining apartment to reach my workspace but can get directly from the hallway into my workspace. It’s what they call an Etagenzimmer, guaranteeing the highest degree of undisturbedness. When I choose, I can sit here without any danger of encountering another person. I am by myself, but not lonely. Sometimes muffled sounds come through the wall from the neighbouring apartment, where a tenant lives and works; she runs a naturopathic practice, and there’s a large crystal on the shoe rack outside her entrance. Sometimes someone practices piano, a beginner probably, but it sounds so distant it must be drifting through the walls from the apartment above.

The room where I work measures 2.65 by 4.38 metres. The ceiling height is 2.67 metres. The room therefore contains a volume of 30.89 cubic metres. If no fresh air entered from outside, I would have an oxygen supply sufficient for 210 hours. But naturally fresh air does enter. And I’ve never spent more than twelve hours straight in the room where I work.

The floor is quietly creaking herringbone parquet, the strips measuring 40 by 8.5 centimetres, laid in the classic right-angled offset. A skirting board runs along the walls, probably in the Old Berlin profile. My desk, a folding standard model from Alinea, stands against the wall to the neighbouring apartment, covered in considerable chaos: magazines, paper, pens, tape dispensers. Beside the table stands the chair I’m sitting on now, a plump Eames Lobby Chair whose right armrest is noticeably thinner than the left. The previous owner headed a Plexiglas trading company and constantly propped his right arm there while telephoning, which gradually thinned the cushion over the years—so the furniture dealer who sold me the chair told me; whether the story is true I don’t know, vintage furniture dealers being accomplished storytellers, but I like the notion that someone sat in this chair hawking Plexiglas on the phone day in, day out.

A shelf built by a friend leans against the wall. He’s a great artist but also a talented furniture maker, having learned the craft in the workshop at Thut Möbel AG. A ceiling spotlight by Eiermann (Tecnolumen ES57) casts its cool light into the room. Otherwise there’s no furniture in the room where I work. The OKI printer (model B412) stands on the cardboard box it arrived in. This way I avoided having to dispose of the box and the Styrofoam inside, and I gained a piece of furniture (the printer reminds me of my old CRT television, the Cuboglass from Brionvega, which came in an aluminium flight case that also serves as the perfect TV stand).

Four sixty-litre Rako stacking crates of grey polypropylene from Utz contain more or less organized documents and office supplies that I hauled from my “old” office after I gave it up—too far from my new place of residence (two architects work there now; it’s a wonderful space with block wood flooring, and sometimes I miss it). At first I thought I could save the money I would spend on renting a workspace and work from home . But that didn’t work. Not because of the small things of everyday life that prevent big thoughts, as with Knausgård, but simply the disruption of the inevitable and unstoppable everyday life of a family of four with cat and the distracting allure of a PlayStation.

That’s why I got myself this cell on Feldeggstrasse, three tram stops from home; twelve minutes on foot, a moment by bicycle. When I look around, I think I should tidy up again. The wastepaper piles up beside the table into a tower reminiscent of the Munch Museum in Oslo. There’s no decoration in this one-man scriptorium, only a thumbnail-sized plastic figure called Pu standing next to the computer on the table like a small rock in the paper surf. Pu is a character from the anime series YuYu Hakusho, a small, bird-like creature with button eyes and long ears. Pu is a spirit beast. He can transform into a giant, phoenix-like bird. Standing on my table, Pu watches over me to ensure I do my work. If I don’t, he transforms into his giant bird form. I’d rather not experience that, since the room is far too small for a phoenix-like bird. Sometimes I talk to Pu. But he just looks at me with his little eyes. His eyes say: Shut up! Keep working! Then I keep working.

Facing Feldeggstrasse, a wooden double door with double-glazed lattice windows opens onto a balcony. The balcony has a low, curved stone balustrade—the house was built long before the introduction of SIA Standard 358, which regulates railings, balustrades and similar protective elements against falls from height in buildings and at their entrances. Part of the balustrade has crumbled away, exposing the rusty reinforcing steel, but I still enjoy sitting on the balcony in the shade of a green-and-white striped awning, on one of two orange Coquillage chairs by Pierre Guariche, watching the traffic—or rather, the problems the intersection seems to cause the traffic, where Feldeggstrasse and Seefeldstrasse cross. At least once every fifteen minutes something goes wrong, with someone honking or cursing, the tram bell shrilling or car tires squealing. But above all, I sit on the balcony because problems await me in the room. Because that’s what writing consists of, mostly. Problems. They’re quite different problems from those arising at the intersection. The problems there are fleeting in nature. Writing a book, by contrast, is a constantly growing web of problems.

The poet Paul Valéry once said something that reeks slightly of saccharine poetry-scented candle: “A poem is a building made of words.” And Alain Robbe-Grillet, one of the fathers of the Nouveau Roman, said: “Today’s novel must be constructed like an object, like a machine or a building.” Indeed, there are similarities between a book and a house. But not only the product shows parallels—so does the way of working: You have a brilliant idea, make a first draft, then a plan, then you build and build and build, which sometimes takes rather a long time, there are delays, construction stops even, then it continues, the thing gets raised, with a topping-out ceremony, list of defects, improvements, finally the roof goes on (with a book, the cover is wrapped around it), keys handed over, done!

And here’s another similarity: most of the architecture I see when I cycle out of the city through the suburbs and villages is boring to poor. Most books in the shops are likewise boring to poor. I say this not as an expert, which I’m not, neither in architecture nor literature, but simply as a seeing and reading person, as a feeling person. But when you stumble upon a genuinely good book or see genuinely good architecture, it’s electrifying.

There is, however, a crucial difference between architecture and literature: nobody can build a house alone. Architecture emerges from teamwork. A book, though, must be written alone. This has advantages (complete control, nobody interfering, delusions of omnipotence) but also disadvantages (loneliness, uncertainty, dreariness). To escape these disadvantages, I can flee to the balcony (without jumping) or leave the house.

On the ground floor of the building on Feldeggstrasse where the room I work in is located, there are two shops and a café-bistro called Escoffier. The two shops are a toy shop and a flower shop, though the latter closed six months ago and has been in transformation ever since. The plan is to create a spiritual concept store offering aura sprays and “magical cat oracle cards,” plus yoga classes and “soul discovery speed readings” for fifty-five francs per twenty minutes.

I often went to Escoffier to hide from work and from Pu’s stern, threatening gaze. There I read the newspapers on display—NZZ, Tages-Anzeiger, Blick, always checking the horoscope in the latter—drank coffee and ate a croissant. Escoffier’s interior had remained largely unchanged since its complete renovation in 1972: dark brown leather booth seating, two large horizontally divided windows that could be opened in summer. The facade bore illuminated red Plexiglas letters that spelt out Café Escoffier—typographically a mixture of Belle Époque and Joseph Churchward’s Tiki style. The menu consisted of a single handwritten and photocopied A4 sheet of paper. On either side of the entrance stood Coca-Cola slate boards, one with a welcome greeting, the other with the daily special. Escoffier was ruled by the “good old days.” But unfortunately, the “good old days” are like long-extinguished suns whose rays we still see only because of the time light takes to travel. That’s why I’m writing about Escoffier in the past tense. Because two days ago, when collecting payment for lunch (fish ragout, rice, vegetables, preceded by soup and salad, 23 francs), Pia, who’d worked at Escoffier for 33 years, said: “That’s it. We’re done.” Bankruptcy. Since then, the doors have been locked, and the sadness is great—as is the incomprehension. When I asked ChatGPT about the reasons, it said: “The transformation of the neighbourhood—with new cafés and modern concepts—has made it difficult for traditional establishments like Escoffier to remain competitive.” The whiff of latte macchiato killed my café.

After usually three quarters of an hour of Escoffier escape, I would return to the problems at my desk. Writing a book also means describing certain things more precisely, capturing them in words, grappling with them through letters—and that’s not always simple. Today, for instance, I have to write a sex scene. I dread it, because sex in books is always a tightrope walk. When you try to capture this intimate act in words, a scene quickly becomes kitsch or sleazy—or stiff, uptight, embarrassing. It lasts too long—or is too short. Sex in novels is often unsatisfying and therefore beloved fodder for literary critics.

Every year the British magazine Literary Review presents the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, aiming to draw attention to crude, tasteless, often carelessly written and redundant sexual passages in modern novels—to prevent such embarrassments in future.

Houses and rooms are also often carelessly described in novels, because that also isn’t a simple matter. Although various awards for ugly buildings exist or have existed (Carbuncle Cup, Dead Prize, Sir Hugh Casson Award), there’s no Bad Architecture in Fiction Award. Perhaps because readers of novels are more interested in sex than architecture?

Architecture always plays a leading role in my novels. On one hand, rooms matter for the atmosphere and mood emerging in a scene; on the other, they matter to me as author. They’re tool and means to an end: imagining rooms—and then thinking my way into them—is an exercise for getting closer to the characters.

I construct a building in my mind, a room, the furnishings, set the lighting, add a little haze—that fine, even mist that makes shadows stand out better—and perhaps underlay the scene with a soundtrack: maybe rain pattering on roof tiles or subtle traffic noise from outside (cars driving over wet streets sound simply wonderful). Only then do the people appear and begin to act. So you build an elaborate film set in your mind, in which the protagonists are let loose upon each other.

However, you mustn’t overdo the architectural details you commit to paper—because as mentioned: readers’ interest in architecture and overly precise descriptions of rooms, facades or historical minutiae has its limits. They want something human—or better yet: all too human. When writing a manuscript, I like to overdo it with details—only to strike them out later. This also applies to descriptions of spaces. The architecture is essentially scaffolding that gets dismantled afterward. Sometimes I decide myself to tear down a few walls, or my beloved editor points it out. Because it’s not always emotionally simple to throw away things you’ve created yourself.

But the maxim “kill your darlings,” often (and falsely) attributed to William Faulkner, is unfortunately all too often correct. I remember painfully how I invested three weeks of working time researching what I considered the fascinating history of cotton swab manufacture and incorporating it into my novel—because the protagonist loved using them during his morning ablutions. On the advice of my beloved editor, I threw most of it in the bin. Not everyone might share my passion for the history of cotton swabs, she said. My beloved editor was surely right—yet I still mourn those hours that weren’t wasted, perhaps, but were lost in terms of volume.

Sometimes I suspect I lose myself in details to avoid dealing with the meat of things and driving the story forward. Researching is simpler than writing. It’s as if I’m escaping from the actual work into the depths of the internet—just as I occasionally flee to balcony or café. In my new novel—which will most probably be called Supertoskana and be published by Kein & Aber in May 2026—one chapter begins with this:

Bernhard had just signed a purchase contract for a five-room apartment in a newly constructed development in a municipality several kilometres beyond the city limits, where property prices were still relatively reasonable, when he received a telephone call informing him that a four-room apartment had become available in the Red Castle.

This sentence alludes to the first sentence of another novel in which a house plays an important role, namely Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin. Nobody will notice this allusion to Levin’s book, because hardly anyone has read Rosemary’s Baby—most only know the film. But such games make the often-dreary working day of a writer somewhat more entertaining. So, this Bernhard received a phone call that anyone would gladly receive. The Red Castle (Rotes Schloss) is a real building in Zurich, on General-Guisan-Quai. Every time I drive past, I think I’d like to live there. Bernhard, however, does not.

The Red Castle was a huge old pile in the centre, near the lake, with bay windows and turrets and full of apartments with high rooms and plenty of cachet, splendid stucco work and even some old fireplaces. That’s how Veronika had described it; he only knew the old pile from outside. The Red Castle didn’t bear its name arbitrarily. It had been erected at the end of the 19th century in a historicist style, a striking edifice with a base of granite and limestone and distinctive red bricks, which were a novelty then and still rarely used for residential buildings. And now an apartment was available, a stroke of luck, the woman from the real estate firm had said on the telephone, and when he asked for time to consider, she’d paused briefly, as if she didn’t understand why he didn’t accept immediately and said he shouldn’t take too long deciding. He replied he’d call back tomorrow; he had to discuss it with his partner.

But the thing was: he’d already signed a purchase contract for an apartment in a development outside the city. An apartment his partner (and soon-to-be mother of his son... hence the aforementioned allusion to Levin’s novel) hadn’t exactly been enthusiastic about.

He thought, and still thinks, it was a bright, generous, modern apartment with a practical floor plan, lockable private cellar compartment, its own washer and dryer, an underground parking space with charging station for his Tesla, and good public transport connections, the train station reachable within minutes by bus. In less than half an hour they’d be in the city centre. He could even reach his practice in twenty minutes by car—traffic permitting. And moreover: the price was still somewhat proportionate, even if the property bubble seething in the city had long since seized the periphery and steadily inflated market values there too.

Architecture isn’t merely backdrop. It tells us more about Bernhard’s character—his inner life and the actions resulting from it—than any purely external description. Or let’s say: it completes the picture. Along with his On running shoes and his weakness for functional jackets, the architecture he chooses belongs to his essence. So we must speak of it.

My first novel, We Hardly Know Each Other, deals specifically with architecture; more precisely, a character named Georg appears in it. Georg is the female protagonist’s boyfriend and he’s an architect. I didn’t assign him this profession arbitrarily. Because of his work, he had much to do at that time: a competition submission, another competition submission, night shifts, nourishment only from what pizza delivery brought.

He came home when she was already sleeping and left while she still lay in bed dreaming of things entirely different from what he was thinking. Georg was occupied with the social organization of the insurance company’s new building, with horizontal insulation, windows, doors, stairs, walls and floors.

When they found time to spend together, he bored her, without noticing, with lengthy monologues about buildings by great architects that fascinated him, like the Torre Velasca in Milan, which he’d visited on a study trip. While they sat in the cheapest Vietnamese place in town at the bottom of Kastanienallee, he had spicy sweet-sour sauce in the corner of his mouth looking like an amber pimple as he chewed a spring roll that nearly burned his tongue, inhaled sharply three times, then held his mouth slightly open while chewing to cool the food being crushed between his teeth, and simultaneously talked about the remarkable building, she yawned. He didn’t notice, but continued: “The tower is about a hundred metres tall and has a peculiar and characteristic mushroom-like form. The height limitation has its reason: it was forbidden to build anything that would overtop the cathedral. The Torre Velasca’s structure recalls the tradition of medieval fortresses and towers with their massive profiles and narrower lower sections, while the upper parts were supported by beams. Are you listening?” She nodded and yawned again, and when the waiter set down the green curry she’d ordered, she thought she was looking into a mirror.

Architect seemed to me the ideal profession for a character who gets betrayed: full of dreams, full of vigour, full of passion—but ultimately trapped in a consuming, hard daily grind and in a sobering reality they themselves create. That the female protagonist leaves Georg is therefore entirely understandable.

My second novel carries the house right in its title: When You Leave Your House, Misfortune Begins. I’ll say it straight away: it’s not a good title for a novel. It’s too long, yet also too short—I should have applied Saarinen’s motto more cleverly. Moreover: “misfortune” in a title, that’s no good—it makes customers in bookshops hesitate. Just recently after a reading in Gockhausen, a woman told me at the book table she couldn’t buy this book. Because who wants misfortune? Misfortune brings calamity. That’s probably why When You Leave Your House, Misfortune Begins didn’t become a bestseller. The title’s fault. It certainly couldn’t have been the content, because it’s superb. Anyway: the book concerns a house—more precisely, an apartment building situated on the fictional Lienhardstrasse in Zurich. A Gertrudstrasse exists in Zurich, named after Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi’s book Lienhard and Gertrud: A Book for the People. And there was a Lienhardstrasse too; it ran parallel to Gertrudstrasse but—for whatever reason—was renamed Wiesendangerstrasse in 1919.

The novel begins with the close observation of a slice of cucumber. It lies in a green space, in the dusty gravel beneath a park bench. Then the camera slowly zooms out (in a film it would be the camera; in a novel you must laboriously describe everything with words), more and more of the scene becomes visible, and finally the camera pans to the house opposite the park, where it has stood these last 108 years. “The five-storey residential building of exposed brick, with mansard hipped roofs with dormers and filigree balconies with richly ornamented wrought-iron grillwork. The house where the people that this story concerns live. These people still are still lying in their warm beds.”

When I conceived the story, I had Volume 4 of the Baukultur in Zürich book series in hand, from which I selected a model house to describe and then populated with my cast. I sketched a plan of the house and the various apartments. I imagined how the stairwell looked and how it smelled in the laundry room—and in the attic too. This brought to mind the architectural models I’m so fond of. I think for architects, building models must surely be one of the most enjoyable parts of their work—perhaps even more enjoyable than building the actual house, since everything remains possible in a model. And I thought of dollhouses. So I used this idea to introduce the characters, addressing the reader directly:

Imagine you’re a giant. Yes, a giant. And the house at Lienhardstrasse 7—that’s your dollhouse. Now lift the roof, very carefully. Set the roof aside and look into the house: you see a young woman in a simple bed in her shared flat, one leg poking out from under the duvet, as if testing the day, just as you dip a toe into a lake to gauge its temperature before diving in. That’s Delphine. Her hair is red and short, the freckles on her closed eyelids fine as dust. Her alarm clock is set for 9:15.

One floor below, you see Virginia Caviezel, née Winkler, 38 years old, deeply asleep on a futon. She murmurs softly in her sleep, words no one hears—and even if someone heard them, no one would understand them, not even she herself. In the next room stands the bed of her 14-year-old daughter Cosima, orphaned because Cosima has travelled, or rather: is staying with her father Cuno, who moved out years ago.

Now lift this floor too, but sshhh, don’t wake the people up: there lies Paola Kesselmann, pale skin, pointed nose, black hair wild from restless sleep. Paola snores, softly like rustling leaves when wind catches a tree. Beside Paola lies her boyfriend Fabio Sonetto, who also snores, but far more powerfully, genuinely loud, rattling, crackling, and at their feet lies Momo, the pug they mostly call “Stinky”, who mimics mistress and master: a triad—clattering, snorting, whistling.

Good, now lift this floor too, set it aside, and you see: there two boys named Luca, ten, and Laurin, six, are sawing logs in their cabin bed plastered with Panini stickers, dreaming Star Wars dreams full of exploding galaxies and electrically humming lightsabres, limbs contorted, Laurin’s feet where his head had been at bedtime. And in the master bedroom, the boys’ parents doze on a Hüsler Nest mattress: Judith and Tim Gutjahr, both caught in dreams that differ somewhat in content and personnel, as if a romantic comedy were playing in one cinema, a porn film in the next—Amélie beside Horny Housewives 7.

Now, giant, lift this floor too, but very quietly, for: Vischer on the ground floor is already up, a cup of milky coffee steaming on the kitchen table where he perches. Classical music plays. He smooths a map flat with his hand, bends over it, gazes at it like a fortune-teller into a crystal ball. There he sits in skin-tight racing kit, resembling, feet in flip-flops, a man of 48 years who’s lived alone for a long time now.

Now, giant, can you reassemble the house, gently, floor by floor, and finally put the roof back on?

Then the actual story begins, told through a handful of people, about their lives, loves and sufferings. That’s probably why houses matter in my books: they bring people together without them truly being together. People living so near to, above and below one another—only walls, ceilings, floors separate them. Only a few metres lie between them—and yet they live their lives knowing little or nothing about what goes on in the other apartments, rooms, heads or hearts.

In When You Leave Your House, Misfortune Begins, the postman drops the same letter into all the mailboxes that morning: notices of termination. The house is to be completely renovated. Everyone must leave. That’s why the people in the house must pull together—people who until then had little or nothing to do with one another. Thanks to the house.

Yes. And now I must return to my room where I work. The small room for small thoughts that arrive layer upon layer, to become sentences, chapters, whole stories—just as if these small thoughts were bricks with which to build a house.