House with Two Entries

The residential building on Alte Landstrasse in Rüschlikon on Lake Zurich is a duplex house with two very different halves, each with its own qualities. The right half of the house is compact and has its dwelling spaces at the entry level and on the floor above. The views toward the lake and the mountains are from the south side. The room on the top floor enjoys evening sun from the west. The left half of the house extends to the extreme. The main living floor is at garden level, where there is access into the garden on all sides. A view of the lake opens up to the east. The bedrooms are on the top floor and face westward and to the lake. The widely separated rooms are connected by an oval stairway and an elevator. All the rooms on the top floor share access to a roof terrace with distant views. Both dwellings have in common that each has a living hall with large windows and a room height of 3.25 meters.

The duplex on Alte Landstrasse is a dream house. A significant role in this dream is played by two other buildings, both of which are important and beautiful homes: Casa Malaparte on Capri and the Wittgenstein House in Vienna. This project measures itself against their spatial and architectural qualities.

The new apartment building is located along a bend in Schauenbergstrasse on the northern slope of the Hönggerberg. It is part of a tranquil neighborhood of single-family homes and simple postwar linear buildings as well as larger ensembles of late-modernist housing further uphill. Given the strong diagonal slope of the site, the house finds its point of emphasis through a differentiated, sculptural form. This plasticity and the formal expression are individualistic. We have spoken of a Nordic fantasy. With its allusion to northern European ideas, there is nevertheless a loose, contextual relationship to the neighborhood.
In a sense, the topography runs through the entire building. The pronounced slope and the uphill-facing west orientation are determining factors for the occasionally archaic-looking interior. A stepped section brings daylight deep into the building and creates different apartments on each floor. This produces a spatiality that is experienced in movement.
The perhaps somewhat anachronistic artisanship in the design finds expression in a distinctive material presence: bright slurry-coated brick in combination with wood clapboard siding, larch, and copper as well as oak, glazed ceramics, and natural stone define the feel.

The townhouses on Stockmattstrasse are sited at the rear of the property, close to Bruggerstrasse, a road that follows the river Limmat, connecting the town of Baden with the municipality of Turgi. A few businesses give the thoroughfare the character of a commercial strip. As part of Baden’s Kappelerhof quarter, the townhouses complement the anonymous fabric of a residential neighborhood consisting of linear buildings, single-family houses, and apartment buildings. Many families live here.

The cooperative townhouses are just 3.75 meters wide and extend over three stories – a height requirement of the local development plan. The interior space develops in section: living spaces and bedrooms line up with a half-story vertical offset on both sides of a central staircase. Rooms with abundant height compensate for the buildings’ narrowness. Each discrete house has five rooms, a garden, and a roof terrace.

Due to their internal spatial configuration, the townhouses are built differently than conventional houses. The floors do not bear on top of walls, but on brackets projecting from vertically continuous demising walls made of concrete. The floor assemblies are built of wood, as are the facades and the roof. The facade cladding takes its inspiration from Japan, and is at once serious and cheerful. The steep metal roofs transform the tall building into a two-story house.

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