The district of Schwamendingen, which was planned as a garden city by A. H. Steiner around 1948, still has its relevance today and retains much of its original character as Zurich’s “garden room”. The design formally adapts the rowed housing type in a new way. The characteristic housing rows react to the narrow and broad exterior elements, as well as to the higher density through volumes that shorten when regarded in perspective. The project’s egalitarian treatment of orientation, exterior spaces and the walkways picks up on the qualities of Steiner’s original plan. The project plans six S-shaped rows, grouped in mirroring pairs, covering the entire building site. Together with the slightly staggered rows, the buildings gain an elegant, finely modulated appearance. Single-storey commercial buildings on Dübendorfstrasse locate the row’s head end at the street.
The proposed living type with a detachable kitchen was developed out of the urban planning placement and highlights the slim nature of the building rows. It unites the qualities of open-plan living with the practical advantages of a kitchen that can be closed. The living room and its balconies are situated on the side of the additional exterior space, alternating its position in each housing row. The building entrances are at the head end and in the middle of the rows. The slightly staggered placement of the façades allows each apartment not only to have a primary east-west view, but also a north-south perspective, looking into the depth of the exterior space and towards the adjoining building sites.

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The new building fills the intersection of Geibelstrasse and Scheffelstrasse like its predecessor, yet it has a freestanding character. The stretches of facade along both streets have similar dimensions, which also recalls the prismatic form of the previously existing building. Additional volume is created by a slender building section that is set back from the street and projects into the green space. The building’s exterior is further calibrated by a notch to the southeast, which ensures good lighting conditions in the apartments and also provides the space needed to preserve a large cedar tree.
Each typical floor has three dwelling units: one 2-room apartment, one 3-room apartment, and one 4-room apartment. Their outdoor spaces are consistently positioned at the corners of the building. At the penthouse level, there are just two dwellings: a 2-room apartment and a 4-room apartment. A distinctive element in all apartments are the windows, whose folded configuration projects either outward or inward. Combined with the doors, the inwardly folded windows regulate the transitions between rooms. Thanks to their positioning, the majority of the rooms open up at their corners to reveal interesting views toward or along the streets or into the garden. At the same time, the interior spaces are well protected from unwanted views and offer sufficient wall space for furnishing.
The exteriors were executed with two different plaster finishes: a fine plaster that surrounds the windows like an embrasure and also creates two narrow bands stretching around the building, reminiscent of the cornice moldings typical of the area, and a coarser plaster that covers the fields in between. Thus the building as a whole has a restrained appearance that serenely fits into the very homogeneous built fabric of the Wipkingen neighborhood. The boundaries between the property and the public space of the street are, as typical for the area, defined with low walls, hedge plantings, and garden gates.

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The neighborhood around Obsthaldenstrasse in Zurich’s Affoltern quarter is characterized by a low building density with abundant greenery dispersed throughout and two- to three-story linear buildings of simple construction. Along the edges of the neighborhood are small groupings of single-family houses. The ownership structure includes both private and cooperative buildings. Due to the plot divisions, the many single-family houses, and the corresponding ownership conditions, it is not presumed that the structure of the neighborhood will undergo transformation into a new urban form. The area can instead be expected to maintain its garden city characteristics.
The new structures are designed as “simple buildings” like their surroundings, and while they are in no way inferior to the houses they replace, neither in the dwellings’ fitness for use nor in the solidity of their construction, they both adopt and advance the garden city condition. The three slender linear buildings have only three stories each and – with their shallow, double-pitched roofs and their reserved appearance with stuccoed exteriors – fit well into the surrounding pattern of development. The outdoor space, in its scale, also takes up the existing condition and works with three elements that are typical for the area: house entrances with front gardens, private yards, and a permeable network of paths.
The dwellings can be used flexibly, thus enabling different forms of living to meet the varying lifestyles of individual residents. The compact and regularized floor plans have yielded cost-effective apartments, but multiple connections in the form of circular internal paths among the individual spaces nevertheless create an impression of spatial generosity.
The exterior openings, some of which are relatively large in relation to the building form, give the buildings their own distinct scale and make them look smaller than they actually are. In addition, their three stories are articulated by a solid concrete base, the stuccoed midsection, and a strongly delineated roof. Along their length, the buildings are given rhythm and visually shortened by projecting elements and alternating vertical bands of roughcast and smooth stucco. The facade reliefs by the artist Christian Hörler tell of everyday life and are related typologically to the gable decoration of the cooperative apartment houses from the 1940s.

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The six-story residential and commercial MIN MAX building is conceived as a city block that attains the maximum permissible height so as to continue the cornice line along Boulevard Lilienthal. In plan, the building fills virtually the entire buildable area, making it key to defining the space of the adjacent streets and green areas. The building has commercial spaces on the ground floor and small apartments for a heterogeneous group of residents, thus providing an alternative to the offerings previously available in the new district of Glattpark.
The project offers four types of small apartments, each with around 40 m² of living space, as well as cluster apartments that enable communal living with individual rooms for every resident. Alongside the important aspect of spanning the range between community and anonymity, particular interest is given here to the question of how compact dwelling units can yield new attributes that transcend a mere reduction in the size of a conventional apartment.
The building surrounds an inner courtyard that is the central and salient place for the community. Access galleries allow it to also serve as a circulation space, and a tower-like glazed element contributes supplemental space for shared use on each floor.

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The Guggach residential development lies on the saddle between the Zurichberg and Käferberg hills, at the urban juncture between downtown Zurich and the northern part of the city. This central urban location is thematized by concentrating the building mass into two meandering rows of seven and eight stories respectively, which span between forest and road. The project emphasizes its urban character through its architectural expression and the design of the exterior space.
Seen against the background of the ascending forest edge, the back-painted, darkly colored cast glass facades convey artificial qualities that simultaneously alternate between weightiness and dematerialization. The exterior space is dominated by expansive water surfaces that subsume the facades into the exterior space through reflection.
In plan, the dwelling units are based on a cruciform shape that expands the north-south orientation of the building form to become omnidirectional, allowing both morning and evening light to enter the living space. The plan, the development and choice of materials for the facades, and the design of the exterior spaces all combine to create a high degree of coherence between urban design, housing form, and architectural expression.

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